Who Controls the Bureaucracy? The Case of Agenda Setting

This paper makes use of thirty-two interviews in five federal agencies to address the question, “who sets the rulemaking agendas in federal agencies? ” The answer to this question is important because of its implications regarding the extent to which this unelected branch is held accountable in our democratic political system and because of the large volume of policymaking performed by federal agencies. The paper finds considerable support for the rational choice theory of congressional dominance. But it also finds that agenda-setting is a much messier process than such a parsimonious theory would allow. Instead, agenda-setting, although dominated by Congress, is more like Kingdon’s garbage can model – a non-rational process with some agenda items attributable to a wide range of political actors-- and like Baumgartner and Jones ’ notion of punctuated equilibrium-- with periods of stasis punctuated by periodic congressional interventions that fundamentally alter the rulemaking activities of federal agencies. This is reassuring in two regards. First, it indicates that unelected officials are responsive to elected ones. And second, it lends empirical support to the pluralist ideal of a political system open and accessible to a wide range of participants