Many conservatives are hostile to The New York Times. I think that’s a shame. Regardless of the political proclivities of its editorial writers or indeed its reporters, the Times has consistently reporting on little-understood aspects of the policy-making apparatus, e.g., Eric Lichtblau’s excellent report on the Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House:

Here at the Caribou on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a few other nearby coffee shops, White House officials have met hundreds of times over the last 18 months with prominent K Street lobbyists — members of the same industry that President Obama has derided for what he calls its “outsized influence” in the capital.

On the agenda over espressos and lattes, according to more than a dozen lobbyists and political operatives who have taken part in the sessions, have been front-burner issues like Wall Street regulation, health care rules, federal stimulus money, energy policy and climate control — and their impact on the lobbyists’ corporate clients.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”

Moreover, use of personal email accounts is very common:

Some lobbyists say that they routinely get e-mail messages from White House staff members’ personal accounts rather than from their official White House accounts, which can become subject to public review. Administration officials said there were some permissible exceptions to a federal law requiring staff members to use their official accounts and retain the correspondence.

Many readers will be outraged by the news that members of the White House consult with lobbyists, but of course K Street provides government officials with an “informational subsidy.” The analytical capabilities of the federal government are considerable, but the demand for analytical capabilities vastly outstrips the government-provided supply. 

In 1999, law professors Daniel Ortiz and Samuel Issacharoff wrote a very useful working paper on “Governing Through Intermediaries”:

If we believe that our agents should act as trustees, transcend our narrow private interests, and seek the public good–a civic republican conception of representation–intermediaries can workto keep them to that task. If, on the other hand, we believe our agents should pursue our narrowprivate interests–a pluralist conception of representation– intermediaries can work to focus them onthis task too. Interestingly, our discussion of intermediation stands independent of any particularconception of representation. The benefits and dangers we point out depend on the agents and intermediaries deviating from the role the principals see for them–whatever that role may be.

On the other hand, Ortiz and Issacharoff explain, intermediaries can introduce new problems, as even the most casual observers of the political scene instinctively understand.

Political intermediaries are second-order agents who help manage the first-order agency relationship betweenvoter and elected official. They are, in economic terms, superagents, who work to minimize thedirect agency costs inherent in representation. But superagents are still agents–particularly powerfulones, in fact–and introduce a whole new set of possible agency costs. Sometimes the superagents,just like the first-order representational agents they help manage, may have their own, rather than their principals’ interests, at heart. They may then encourage elected officials to deviate from the voters’ interests in order to further the intermediaries’ own.

This is the landscape we have to keep in mind when we try to reform, say, campaign finance regulations. Simply insisting that K Street lobbyists who visit the White House sign a visitors’ log is, bluntly, pretty idiotic if the goal is to manage these principal-agent problems. Unfortunately, Ortiz and Issacharoff don’t offer very promising solutions for how we’d go about managing these problems beyond the usual calls for transparency, but they do offer a useful framework for thinking through the problem.