Title: Agency Discretion and the Limits of Procedural Reform
Abstract: One way politicians and courts try to influence policy decisions made by administrative agencies is by imposing procedural requirements on the agency decision process. During the 1960-1990 time period, Congress and the courts imposed a succession of increasingly rigorous procedural requirements on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's hydroelectric licensing program in an attempt to make the agency more responsive to environmental concerns. In this paper, I examine in detail the agency's reaction to these procedural reforms in an attempt to explain the why these attempts met with only limited success. I find that each time Congress or the courts imposed a new procedural requirement on the FERC decision-making process, the agency was able to construe the new procedural mandate and use its retained substantive discretion to minimize the substantive policy effects of the new procedures.
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-03-23
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot