Congress as manager: oversight hearings and agency morale

Abstract

Federal agencies perform many important tasks, from guarding against terrorist plots to mailing social security checks. A key question is whether Congress can effectively manage such a large and influential bureaucracy. We argue that Congress, in using oversight to ensure agency responsiveness to legislative preferences, risks harming agency morale, which could have negative long-run effects on performance and the implementation of public policy. More specifically, we argue that oversight's effects on agency morale are conditional on whether oversight is adversarial or friendly. We assess our claims using a novel data set of the frequency and tone of hearings in which federal agencies are called to testify before Congress from 1999 to 2011 and merge it with data on agency autonomy and job satisfaction. Our findings suggest that agency morale is sensitive to congressional oversight attention, and thus speak to questions regarding democratic accountability, congressional policymaking and the implementation of public policy.

Congress and Administrative Policymaking: Identifying Congressional Veto Power

“…By contrast, and consistent with the findings presented here, scholars have recently drawn attention to subtler ways that Congress can control administrators, including leverage gained in the appropriations process (Berry ; MacDonald ), investigations (Parker and Dull ), and related oversight hearings (Kriner and Schwartz ). These activities do not give Congress the same legal authority to constrain administrators in the typical way that statutes do, but they can achieve similar results through a host of different pathways, including degrading agency resources and morale (Marvel and McGrath ) and undercutting their public support (Kriner and Schickler ). In this article, I show that the scope of Congress's veto power over administrative policymaking, in the aggregate at least, appears to be substantial.…”

“…More aggressively, Congress can subject administrative policy makers to hearings and subpoenas (Ainsworth, Harward and Moffett ; Kriner and Schwartz ; MacDonald and McGrath ). Like letters, these activities also do not have binding policy consequences, although they may have influence nonetheless (Christenson and Kriner ), such as by diminishing agency morale (Marvel and McGrath ), undermining an agency's public support (Kriner and Schickler ), paralyzing agency decision making by diverting the attention of its top officials (Oleszek ), or warning the agency that Congress has the resolve to explore more severe punitive measures (Cameron and Rosendorff ) . While all of these actions taken by Congress can be explored further in isolation, as many of the above studies have done, my focus here is on how the extent of their collective influence can be detected empirically.…”

“…The Executive's veto right can be motivated by the White House's ability to centrally review agency policy proposals and remove key subordinate agents (Acs ; Wiseman ). The Legislature's veto right can be motivated by Congress's leverage over agency appropriations (MacDonald ) and the deterrence effects associated with costly oversight hearings (Kriner and Schwartz ; Marvel and McGrath ), among other pressure points discussed above . To capture the complexity of administrative policymaking, in which policy proposals can routinely take years from initiation to completion (Kerwin and Furlong ), the game is played over two periods, starting with a policy investment period when the Agency can initiate a proposal (period 1) and followed by a policy realization period when the proposal is finalized (period 2).…”

Why Do Bureaucrats Make Campaign Contributions to Presidential Candidates?: Evidence from 2004 to 2012

“…Additionally, agency structure such as insulation produces different agency outcomes depending on the degree of insulation from political actors (Selin ). Also, the relative influence from political actors (Lee and Whitford ; Marvel and McGrath ) likely correlates with the political participation of individual employees in the federal government as individuals who report more policy influence from political actors have a greater interest in seeing a particular party control the executive or legislative branches. These agency characteristics situate employees in different agency contexts that could influence the decisions of the individual to participate in elections or the ability of the agency to act collectively in the electoral arena.…”

Following the Leaders: Issue Attention and Agenda Dynamics in Women’s Health Care Policy

“…I also consider sponsor's participation in hearings, looking for sponsors who also show up as witnesses at hearings. While legislators testifying at hearings is rare, when they do it is often a sign of their expertise and investment in an issue (Fenno 1973;Marvel and McGrath 2016). I use ProQuest Congressional (https://www.proquest.com) and the subject search term "womens health" to identify 414 hearings concerning women's health from 1945-2018.…”