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Reform proposals related to agency control of the administrative state

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Ballotpedia's five pillars of the administrative state provide a framework for understanding the authority, influence, and actions of administrative agencies, as well as the policies and arguments surrounding them. The five pillars focus on the control of administrative agencies related to the (1) legislative, (2) executive, and (3) judicial branches of government, (4) the public, and (5) other agencies or sub-agencies.

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The agency control pillar focuses on the structure and function of administrative agencies. While the majority of agencies are housed under the executive branch, others are established as independent federal agencies or are housed under the legislative or judicial branches. These structural variations impact agency oversight as well as agency interactions across branches. This pillar also involves understanding the nuts and bolts of agency functions, including rulemaking and adjudication proceedings.

This page contains reform proposals related to agency control of the administrative state. Ballotpedia has identified three major types of reform categories related to agency control:

  • Internal agency rulemaking procedures: This category focuses on proposals to reform how rules are initiated and reviewed within agencies themselves.
  • Civil service and staffing reform: This category addresses reforms to civil service hiring, training, staffing, and agency communication, with the goal of improving expertise, accountability, independence, and public understanding of agency functions.
  • Agency structure and location: This category includes reforms aimed at decentralizing or restructuring agencies, especially by changing their geographic or operational footprints.

Readers can explore related reforms by visiting the other four pillars:

Internal agency rulemaking procedures

This category focuses on proposals to reform how rules are initiated and reviewed within agencies themselves.

Require Senate-confirmed agency officials to initiate and issue rules

U.S. Representative Ben Cline (R-Va.), joined by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine ) and five Republican cosponsors, on January 13, 2023, filed the Ensuring Accountability in Agency Rulemaking Act—a bill that aims to require that all agency rules be initiated and issued by Senate-confirmed agency officials. [1]

Cline stated that the bill is a response to a 2019 study by the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) finding that the majority of rules promulgated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies between 2001 and 2017 were issued by lower-level, non-Senate-confirmed officials. U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Edmond v. United States (1977), according to PLF, requires that only principal agency officers can issue rules with the force and effect of law.[1]

Cline told Fox News that he and Golden "share an outlook on overreaching executive branch authority, and I think we’re trying to solve a problem here that’s … affecting the daily lives of Americans.”[1]

The bill passed the House on December 7, 2023.[2]

Require Rules Review Officer within each agency

This reform proposal would establish an internal officer in each agency tasked with overseeing and reviewing the agency’s rulemaking activity.

Require agencies to re-examine their own rules (or re-examine and reduce their rules by certain amounts)

This reform proposal calls for periodic self-audits of agency rules, with the goal of simplification, reduction, or elimination of outdated or excessive regulations.

Require supermajority approval by rulemaking boards and commissions for rules with estimated costs above certain thresholds

This reform proposal would require rulemaking boards and commissions to approve economically significant rules by a supermajority or unanimous vote, depending on projected cost levels. These proposals are aimed at increasing deliberation and accountability for high-impact regulations.

  • North Carolina H402 (2025) would have required rulemaking boards and commissions to approve permanent rules with projected aggregate costs of $1 million or more over five years by a two-thirds vote, and those costing $10 million or more by a unanimous vote. The bill was vetoed by the governor and did not become law.[3]

Civil service and staffing reform

This category addresses reforms to civil service hiring, training, staffing, and agency communication, with the goal of improving expertise, accountability, independence, and public understanding of agency functions.

Hiring and training reforms

This subcategory includes proposals to alter how civil servants are selected and prepared for agency work.

Replace degree-based hiring in the civil service with skills-based hiring

This proposal would pass legislation to modify hiring practices in the civil service by replacing degree-based hiring with skills-based hiring.

  • The Chance to Compete Act aimed to modify the federal civil service hiring system by replacing degree-based hiring with skills- and competency-based hiring. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) introduced the bill on January 9, 2023. The bill passed the U.S. House of Representatives on January 24, 2023, with a vote of 422-2.[4]

Create an ROTC program for the civil service

This proposal argues that a subsidized program that recruits and trains talented college students similar to ROTC for the military would improve the quality of the civil service.[5]

  • Jon Michaels argued, "A ROTC for civilian government would recruit, train, subsidize, and help place a new generation of government officials. Developing a direct pipeline of government employees has countless advantages. A splashy program of this sort would generate buzz, familiarity, and respect for government service, making it much harder for people to credibly portray such service as parasitic, alien, or subversive. Subsidizing college, just as ROTC does, would make it easier for would-be public servants to commit to government employment, rather than chase the big bucks of, say, Wall Street (if for no other reason than to pay off hefty student loans). Additionally, a civilian ROTC would help diversify the population of government workers. [...] Recruiting at many colleges and universities, including those with rather conservative campus cultures, would surely help attract an even broader cross-section of the population at large."[5]

Create an organization like the Federalist Society to train agency staff

This proposal argues that conservative opponents of the administrative state should create an organization like the Federalist Society and teach people how to work within the federal bureaucracy to restrain its activities.[6]

  • Lyman Stone argued, "To drain the swamp, we will need structured mentorships with carefully identified conservative federal bureaucrats, seminars and programs aimed at nudging existing bureaucrats in a conservative direction, cultivation of high-quality masters programs in public policy and public administration, and concerted efforts to identify and groom young conservative talent for federal careers at an early stage."[6]
"We need a Federalist Society for socially conservative federal workers, we need MPA/MPP programs staffed and funded with academics friendly to conservative programs, we need existing talent recruitment and internship programs to re-orient their curricula towards actually training people to take on the state, and we need conservative donors to put up the money to support these efforts."[6]

Staffing and political appointees

This subcategory deals with the structure and influence of political leadership in agencies.

Limit the ability of political appointees to interact with agency career scientific staff

This reform would have Congress pass new laws to insulate career civil service experts within agencies from interference by political appointees at those agencies.[5]

  • Law professor Thomas McGarity argued, "The solution must take the form of stronger barriers between the technical analysts and political appointees at this early step when the scientific and technical analysis is being conducted. Virtually every regulatory decision of any consequence in an agency involved in health, safety, or environmental regulation begins with a literature search and synthesis of the available information that speaks to issues relevant to the decision. This step — whether separated explicitly in the agency decision process or not — involves characterizing the existing scientific literature and highlighting any remaining gaps, uncertainties and open questions relevant to the issues raised by the regulation."[5]
"Institutional boundaries around agency experts to preserve the integrity of their initial scientific assessment is necessary. In any covered agency action, the professional staff’s literature search and analysis of the existing scientific literature would be published as a separate report before the agency’s policy analysis begins. The work of the agency staff in producing this report would also be firewalled from all political communications."[5]

Remove layers of political appointees at agencies

Advocates of this reform proposal argue that the quality of the civil service would improve if there were more career opportunities within the leadership structure of agencies.[5]

  • Jon Michaels argued, "[W]e need to declutter the layers and layers of political appointees atop the agencies. It isn’t just the head of the agency and various deputy, under, and assistant secretaries who serve at the pleasure of the president. It is also any number of political aides attached to each of those officials. There is much to lament, as a matter of policy and logistics, regarding political layering. For present purposes, the most pertinent reason to remove at least some of those layers is to ensure that the strongest, most capable civil servants have ample room to move upward — and thus ample incentive to stay in government for the long haul."[5]

Public engagement and transparency

This subcategory promotes increasing public understanding and trust through enhanced communication.

Increase agency public relations budgets

Advocates of this reform proposal argue that bigger advertising budgets for agencies would help them attract and keep more talented employees.[5]

  • Jon Michaels argued, "By and large, for a political economy as big and complicated as the United States, government runs well. That message needs to be conveyed — over and over again — so the public is reminded (or informed for the very first time). Reminding the public will be good for recruitment; it will be good for engendering greater political support; and it will be good for the president and Cabinet officials to be mindful of the public’s newfound appreciation for bureaucracy. [...] It is no doubt harder to make EPA and DOE officials look as sexy and heroic as Navy Seals and Army Rangers. But even if pro-bureaucracy public relations efforts accomplished nothing more than rebutting some negative stereotypes about the civil service, such programming would be immeasurably helpful in restoring a good deal of respect and appreciation."[5]

Agency structure and location

This category includes reforms aimed at decentralizing or restructuring agencies, especially by changing their geographic or operational footprints.

Decentralization and relocation

This subcategory proposes changes to where agencies operate and how much work is contracted out.

Relocate federal agency headquarters

This proposal argues that relocating all federal agency headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., would improve agencies by incorporating more regional perspectives into the federal workforce. Trump administration officials moved the headquarters of two sub-agencies of the Agriculture Department to Kansas City, Missouri, and the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado. The Biden administration later returned the BLM headquarters to Washington, D.C., while retaining a Colorado presence. Lawmakers have also sought to implement this proposal through legislation. For example, U.S. Representative Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) on October 26, 2021, introduced the Drain the Swamp Act, which proposed relocating all federal agency headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., in order to "diversify the federal workforce and ensure that a broader cross section of America’s population participates in federal policymaking," according to Davidson.[7]

Reduce executive branch outsourcing

Advocates of this proposal see privatization of government functions as a source of abuse and fraud by private contractors.[5] This proposal aims to increase agency independence by restricting the ability of agencies to outsource tasks to contractors.[5]

  • Law professor Jon Michaels made the following argument in an article for the American Constitution Society, "With outsourcing as the default, even non-privatized pockets of the administrative state might lack the benefits associated with having strong, potentially contentious civil servants. That’s because those civil servants may be deterred from challenging agency heads on matters of law or policy. They’ll be deterred because they know how easy it would be for those agency heads to outsource their jobs, too."[5]
"Thus, any reform agenda must include an express commitment to switching the default, and instead insourcing heretofore privatized work as soon as feasible. Doing so will sharply reduce the ease with which agency heads can contract around an independent, forceful bureaucracy."[5]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 [[1](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/minor-faceless-federal-officials-stripped-power-regulate-new-bipartisan-bill) Fox News, "Minor, faceless federal officials would be stripped of their power to regulate in new bipartisan bill," January 17, 2023]
  2. ↑ [[2](https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/508?s=1&r=88) Congress.gov, "H.R.508 - ATF Accountability Act of 2023," December 21, 2023.]
  3. ↑ [[3](https://legislation.ballotpedia.org/admin-state/bill/18717) Ballotpedia Legislation Tracker, "North Carolina H402", accessed June 25, 2025]
  4. ↑ Congress.gov, "H.R.159 - Chance to Compete Act of 2023," accessed August 31, 2023
  5. ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 5.11 5.12 American Constitution Society, "Rethinking Admin Law: From APA to Z," accessed July 9, 2019
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 The Federalist, "To Make America Great Again, The Right Needs To Learn How To Run Bureaucracies," Lyman Stone, June 13, 2019
  7. ↑ GovTrack, "H.R. 5712 (117th): Drain the Swamp Act of 2021," accessed January 23, 2023
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