I worked on influencing healthcare policy during both the Obama and Trump presidencies, which I think is about as big of a swing as you can get on the executive side. My experience was that there was moderate leeway on the executive side. For example, legislation would require a certain amount of money to be distributed amongst healthcare providers who had “high quality” care, but “high-quality” shifted from “scores better than their peers” to “reports any amount of quality data to the government.” (The latter standard effectively meaning that everyone was “high-quality”, so the program was approximately useless.) However, the government has a ton of inertia and executives have limited resources, so things often continued on as they were before, even if executives really wanted things to change.
I can think of a couple of ways in which executive branch lobbying can be “sticky”:
Something which I didn’t appreciate until working on this is that it’s often quite hard for the government to actually do the thing it is trying to do. Officials often simply haven’t thought through how some policy would affect a stakeholder, or what would happen in some unusual circumstance, simply because there are so many different things to consider. Many of my suggestions were things like “this section contradicts this other section if some circumstance occurs so you should fix that” and I expect to those to stick relatively well because it’s pretty uncontroversial.
As I alluded to above, most government employees are nonpolitical staffers who mostly just do their job the way their predecessor trained them. I’m sure you’ve heard stories about government departments using computer systems from the 1970s or whatever, and a similar thing can happen at the process level. Even if the executive branch has the ability to change the interpretation of some term, they often won’t, just because changing is hard.
This is just from my personal experience, and I’m not sure how it would compare to working with other branches of government (or even other executive-branch agencies).
I worked on influencing healthcare policy during both the Obama and Trump presidencies, which I think is about as big of a swing as you can get on the executive side. My experience was that there was moderate leeway on the executive side. For example, legislation would require a certain amount of money to be distributed amongst healthcare providers who had “high quality” care, but “high-quality” shifted from “scores better than their peers” to “reports any amount of quality data to the government.” (The latter standard effectively meaning that everyone was “high-quality”, so the program was approximately useless.) However, the government has a ton of inertia and executives have limited resources, so things often continued on as they were before, even if executives really wanted things to change.
I can think of a couple of ways in which executive branch lobbying can be “sticky”:
Something which I didn’t appreciate until working on this is that it’s often quite hard for the government to actually do the thing it is trying to do. Officials often simply haven’t thought through how some policy would affect a stakeholder, or what would happen in some unusual circumstance, simply because there are so many different things to consider. Many of my suggestions were things like “this section contradicts this other section if some circumstance occurs so you should fix that” and I expect to those to stick relatively well because it’s pretty uncontroversial.
As I alluded to above, most government employees are nonpolitical staffers who mostly just do their job the way their predecessor trained them. I’m sure you’ve heard stories about government departments using computer systems from the 1970s or whatever, and a similar thing can happen at the process level. Even if the executive branch has the ability to change the interpretation of some term, they often won’t, just because changing is hard.
This is just from my personal experience, and I’m not sure how it would compare to working with other branches of government (or even other executive-branch agencies).