The U.S. Congress and the Institutional Design of Agencies

Theories of agency design maintain that lawmakers impose requirements on how bureaucratic agencies make policy decisions, preventing those agencies from undermining lawmakers' political and policy goals. Empirical support for these theories is limited, however, by the difficulty of measuring critical variables hypothesized to influence the use of this tool of political control. For this study, I employed a methodology particularly well suited, but not previously employed, to study variance in the use of agency‐design provisions: interviews with congressional committee staff. Staffers' responses support several theories, cast doubt on one explanation, and point to nuances in other explanations of agency design.