FWIW, I’d love to see a follow-up review on lobbying Executive Branch agencies. They’re less powerful than Congress, but often more influenceable as well, and can sometimes be the most relevant target of lobbying if you’re aiming for a very specific goal (that is too “in the weeds” to be addressed directly in legislation). I found Godwin et al. (2012) helpful here, but I haven’t read much else. Interestingly, Godwin et al. find that some of the conclusions from Baumgartner et al. (2009) about Congressional lobbying don’t hold for agency lobbying.
Though I didn’t read Godwin (now on my to-do list), I encountered some useful research that seemed to point toward the idea that regulatory lobbying could be a lot more efficient than legislative lobbying. By the end of my review, I had started to think that it would have more productive to do that instead.
Since I finished, though, I’ve been thinking about one of the main concerns I have about regulatory lobbying. The fact that it’s probably (comparatively) easy to influence regulatory agencies means that it’s pretty easy to walk back any positive rule changes. This seems to happen fairly frequently, e.g. with EPA regulations.
From that standpoint, the stickiness of the status quo in the legislative context is also an advantage: when policy change succeeds legislatively, the new policy becomes part of the difficult-to-change status quo. For longermist-oriented policies, it seems like this is a major advantage over regulatory changes.
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).
Thanks for this!
FWIW, I’d love to see a follow-up review on lobbying Executive Branch agencies. They’re less powerful than Congress, but often more influenceable as well, and can sometimes be the most relevant target of lobbying if you’re aiming for a very specific goal (that is too “in the weeds” to be addressed directly in legislation). I found Godwin et al. (2012) helpful here, but I haven’t read much else. Interestingly, Godwin et al. find that some of the conclusions from Baumgartner et al. (2009) about Congressional lobbying don’t hold for agency lobbying.
Though I didn’t read Godwin (now on my to-do list), I encountered some useful research that seemed to point toward the idea that regulatory lobbying could be a lot more efficient than legislative lobbying. By the end of my review, I had started to think that it would have more productive to do that instead.
Since I finished, though, I’ve been thinking about one of the main concerns I have about regulatory lobbying. The fact that it’s probably (comparatively) easy to influence regulatory agencies means that it’s pretty easy to walk back any positive rule changes. This seems to happen fairly frequently, e.g. with EPA regulations.
From that standpoint, the stickiness of the status quo in the legislative context is also an advantage: when policy change succeeds legislatively, the new policy becomes part of the difficult-to-change status quo. For longermist-oriented policies, it seems like this is a major advantage over regulatory changes.
Curious to hear your thoughts.
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).