Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Behind these procedures, Bagley suggested, were two very real concerns: legitimacy and accountability. How can a government as powerful and vast as that of the United States maintain legitimacy? How could it maintain accountability to citizens? These fears reflect, in part, the age in which the rules were written. The 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which governs much of the federal government’s bureaucratic workings, was adopted “to soothe the jangled nerves of legal and business communities alarmed by the New Deal and the muscular wartime exercise of state power.”83 Then came the buildup of procedural architecture in the ’70s, when liberal lawyers, inspired by the courtroom heroics of the civil rights movement, turned to the legal system to make sure that the government actually worked on behalf of the people. The system we developed is unique. Decisions that are often made by bureaucracies in other countries are made by judges in our country. Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls it adversarial legalism.