Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

When Congress commands government agencies to regulate, do they? One of the key questions in the administrative law and political science literatures has been the extent to which Congress controls the agencies to whom it delegates enormous law-making power. But few studies empirically examine agency compliance with Congressional commands. Using an original dataset that links federal statutes to rules produced by multiple federal government agencies over a forty-year period, we provide a novel empirical analysis of agency regulatory responsiveness to Congressional statutes. We analyze almost 400 statutes delegating regulatory authority to the Department of Interior (DOI) between January 1, 1947 and December 31, 1987. Regulatory agencies include the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the National Park Service (NPS). We utilize flexible parametric models for survival analysis to assess (1) the time to the first NPRM issues, (2) the time to the first final rules issued, and (3) the time to any NPRM hailing from the statutes.