Allies and Adversaries: Appointees and Policymaking Under Separation of Powers

Public sector agencies are an important front in the day-to-day battle for political supremacy between the executive and the legislature. The executive's key agents in this conflict are his appointees, who frequently play one of two roles: Congressional allies, where they help Congress implement policy and Congressional adversaries, where they fight with Congress to shift policy strongly toward the executive. This article studies how these two roles arise and what implications they have for administrative policymaking. It highlights how intrinsically motivated bureaucrats combined with hierarchical control affect the ability of the political principals to control the execution of policy. I explore how this interaction shifts under alternative institutional forms, and how it leads appointees to "go native." The model makes several predictions concerning Congressional oversight of bureaucratic agencies. An empirical analysis of audit reports released by the Government Accountability Office finds patterns of oversight consistent with these predictions. The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Yale University. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.