Congress Should Stop Passing the Buck to the Bureaucracy

Lawmakers pass laws full of lofty goals — “promote the public interest” or “ensure fairness” — and leave the tough choices to regulators who weren’t on anyone’s ballot. It’s tidy politics: take credit for ideals, outsource the trade-offs, blame the bureaucracy when the sausage tastes funny. But if we want an accountable government, Congress must stop writing postcards and start writing laws again.

We all learned the Schoolhouse Rock version of American civics: Congress makes the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts interpret them. Somewhere along the way, that got translated into “Congress sketches a vibe, agencies fill in the details.” The problem is that the “details” now encompass the most significant questions: what to regulate, how stringent the regulations should be, and at what cost. That’s not a detail; that’s the job.

RB

About the Author

Reeve Bull

Reeve Bull is the director of Virginia’s Office of Regulatory Management and author of a new special report by Pacific Legal Foundation.

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Lawmakers pass laws full of lofty goals — “promote the public interest” or “ensure fairness” — and leave the tough choices to regulators who weren’t on anyone’s ballot. It’s tidy politics: take credit for ideals, outsource the trade-offs, blame the bureaucracy when the sausage tastes funny. But if we want an accountable government, Congress must stop writing postcards and start writing laws again.

We all learned the Schoolhouse Rock version of American civics: Congress makes the laws, the president enforces them, and the courts interpret them. Somewhere along the way, that got translated into “Congress sketches a vibe, agencies fill in the details.” The problem is that the “details” now encompass the most significant questions: what to regulate, how stringent the regulations should be, and at what cost. That’s not a detail; that’s the job.