Administrative Law Without Congress: Of Rewrites, Shell Games, and Big Waivers

ABSTRACT:

Administrative law has ceased to respond adequately to the challenges posed by modern-day executive government. We suggest that the discordance reflects a mismatch between the debilities of the Congress and an administrative regime built on legislative supremacy.

Administrative law—in its New Deal and its modern, post-Chevron forms—presuppose a Congress that is jealous of its legislative powers. However, the modern Congress has increasingly dis-empowered itself. It consistently fails to update old statutes even when they are manifestly outdated or, as actually administered, have assumed contours that neither the enacting nor the current Congress would countenance. When Congress does legislate, it tends to enact highly convoluted and often incoherent “hyper-legislation.”

We examine the effects first on agencies, and then on courts and their doctrines. Knowing that there is no turning (back) to Congress, agencies are tempted to improvise policies lacking legislative authority. In turn, administrative law doctrines that were developed under very different institutional conditions start to bend.

We describe three increasingly common forms of agency action: (1) agency “re-writes” of statutes; (2) procedural shell games and manipulation; and (3) broad regulatory waivers without or in excess of a statutory warrant. We provide illustrations in the “old statutes” and “hyper-legislation” settings. Our principal old-statute example is the Clean Air Act and the protracted litigation over the EPA’s regulation of greenhouse gases, culminating (for now) in the Supreme Court’s decision in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA. Our principal examples of hyper-legislation are the Dodd-Frank Act and the Affordable Care Act, including the pending litigation over the scope of the act’s subsidy and mandate provisions.

We conclude with a plea for more institutional realism and less interpretive metaphysics in administrative law.