What helps presidents achieve their policy agendas: presidential control or administrative capacity?

That question is at the center of Professor Nicholas Bednar’s research and is the focus of his journal article, to be published by the Stanford Law Review next year. Bednar, who earned his J.D. from the University of Minnesota in 2016 and his PhD from Vanderbilt University, joined the Minnesota Law faculty in 2023.

While long interested in the topic of public administration, Bednar says his interest was particularly piqued when the U.S. government began rolling out massive programs related to Covid-19 vaccines and pandemic aid. At the time, he was exploring potential dissertation subjects for his PhD in political science. Observing various federal agencies perform in this moment led him to take a deep dive into the administrative state.

“I wanted to know why some of these agencies appeared really good at developing policy and implementing regulations and why some were really struggling even though they had had decades to prepare,” says Bednar. “While presidential control allows a president to set an agency’s policymaking agenda, agencies also need experienced policymaking teams. Scholars assume that these agencies have sufficient capacity to implement a president’s agenda but that’s not always the case.” 

Bednar defines capacity as the agency’s ability – not its willingness – to complete tasks delegated by the president and Congress. “It’s the experience of the people, the resources available to the agency, and the management processes that promote efficiency and teamwork,” he says. “But measuring capacity can be difficult.”

A Focus on Human Capital

He chose to focus his research on human capital, recognizing that the task of policymaking requires people with expertise and procedural understanding, as well as competitive salaries to retain these individuals. He drew on a survey of federal executives engaged in rulemaking, a dataset of more than 190 million federal personnel records, and a dataset of more than 5,000 rulemakings over the course of the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.

 Using quarterly data for federal employees, he aggregated agency of employment, salary, education level, length of government service, number of employees in a particular agency doing similar work, and other key items.

Bednar’s research showed that presidents struggle to implement their agendas in agencies with low capacity, regardless of whether they have significant control over those agencies. He also found that presidents are more inclined to neglect agencies than actively build their capacity for policymaking and implementation. 

Bednar found that more than half of federal executives report no investments from the White House. Presidents regularly fail to nominate officials to key positions that manage agency personnel, finances, and procurement. Some presidents actively diminish capacity by encouraging career employees to exit public service.

“Presidents would be wise to remember that career employees are crucial to rulemaking,” Bednar says. “The only way to get good policy is to have people with long careers in the policy area. Sadly, it’s not uncommon that elected officials think they know the solution but actually don’t because they do not have the knowledge or lived experience.”

The Limitations of Administrative Capacity

Bednar cites several situations where administrative capacity had a significant impact on a wide swath of the U.S. population. Hurricane Katrina is perhaps one of the most understood examples. Another is the U.S. Postal Service, which, since the 1970s, has experienced steady disinvestment. By the time the pandemic hit, there was not enough capacity to process stimulus and Social Security checks in a timely manner, so thousands of people didn’t have money for rent or food. Poultry farmers who depended on the mail for incubated eggs experienced significant delays that destroyed the eggs and led to nationwide shortages for consumers. 

“When presidents campaign on toughening immigration laws or issuing millions of stimulus checks, the rarely consider whether implementing agencies have sufficient capacity to complete these tasks,” Bednar writes in his article.

Another example was the decision to move the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters from Washington, DC, to Grand Junction, CO, in 2020. In that move, the agency lost one-third of its employees who had at least 25 years of experience. “That’s not the kind of experience you can replace quickly,” Bednar says. “That move continues to have tremendous impact on rulemaking and implementation in the Bureau.” 

Bednar hopes that his research drives future presidents to take seriously their responsibility to build capacity across the agencies. “In an ideal world, presidents would say, ‘We made a mistake in thinking that we need to control an agency when we should be focusing on recruiting and retention,’” he says. “It takes a lot longer to build capacity than to lose it.”