Rulemaking: how government agencies write law and make policy

Rulemaking is the single most important function performed by agencies of government. Some readers may find this a surprising, if not outrageous, assertion. But consider the breadth and depth of influence that rulemaking has on our lives.

Rulemaking refines, and in some instances defines, the mission of every government agency. In so doing it provides direction and content for budgeting, program implementation, procurement, person nel management, dispute resolution, and other important government activities. Rules provide specific, authoritative statements of the obliga tions the government has assumed and the benefits it must provide. It is to rules, not statutes or other containers of the law, that we turn most often for an understanding of what is expected of us and what we can expect from government. As a result, intense political activity sur rounds the contemporary rulemaking process, and effective political action in America is no longer possible without serious attention to rulemaking.

The centrality of rulemaking in our public policy system has placed it under considerable stress. The demand for rules created by hundreds of new government programs and the intense scrutiny of the process by which they are developed gives rise to persistent questions from the business and academic communities about the quantity of rules, their quality, and the time it takes to write them. Whether the problems the questions address are real or perceived, the questions themselves raise doubts in the public's mind about the ability of rulemaking to play its vital role. These doubts-and the failures they sometimes reflect-often reduce the effectiveness of public programs and reverberate throughout the political system.

This book is the first general text on rulemaking intended for students and practitioners of public administration, political science, and public policy. Although this book is distinctive in the breadth and mix of issues considered, it is hardly unique in its focus on the general topic. James O'Reilly's Administrative Rulemaking and Arthur Bonfield's State Admin istrative Rule Making are legal treatises on rulemaking. Virtually every text on administrative law includes a chapter or section devoted to rulemaking. In Bureaucratic Discretion, Gary Bryner examines rule making in many agencies to determine the extent of freedom agency officials enjoy when making policy decisions. Wesley Magat and his colleagues stand virtually alone in their attempt in Rules in the Making to apply rigorous empirical analysis to explain the outcomes of rulemaking in a single regulatory program. In his classic Smoking and Politics, Lee Fritschler uses rulemaking to explore the dynamics of subsystem politics. William West, in Administrative Rulemaking: Politics and Processes, examines the topic in the context of the Federal Trade Commission. In Setting Safety Standards, Ross Cheit explores the differ ences between public institutions and private organizations in estab lishing a certain type of rule.