I think a lot in here depends on how much one thinks that government agencies are actually responsive to political and legal forces... and how much ability they have to alter their internal processes. I imagine there are a variety of answers for the many, many agencies in question.
I've heard legends of a head of an agency taking a huge, 500+ page binder of rules, policies, and procedures to his bureaucratic overlords (plenty of agencies are subordinate agencies), basically begging for some of the constraints to be lifted and other authorities to be delegated down. Many hindrances come from other bureaucrats. I don't know if I'd call this a third axis or a part of the second axis.
The gold standard of have-to-dos are statutes and judicial rulings. I think most everything else is flexible... if you can get it to the right high-level bureaucrat or political appointee to sign off on it. I have to imagine that, like any sufficiently sizable company with loads of legacy internal 'rules', some of them just get conveniently forgotten anyway, unless some top-floor Joe gets a bee in his bonnet about it. So the question is what does the ratio of have-to-dos to flexible look like for different agencies? Of course, this plays into Scott's point; the measurement here is difficult - and different from just counting the number of bureaucrats.
Like, what happens when FDA staff slow-roll you because
I think that goes back to how much one thinks that government agencies are actually responsive to political and legal forces. This is picking a different point on the 'responsiveness to political forces' scale.
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Notes -
I think a lot in here depends on how much one thinks that government agencies are actually responsive to political and legal forces... and how much ability they have to alter their internal processes. I imagine there are a variety of answers for the many, many agencies in question.
I've heard legends of a head of an agency taking a huge, 500+ page binder of rules, policies, and procedures to his bureaucratic overlords (plenty of agencies are subordinate agencies), basically begging for some of the constraints to be lifted and other authorities to be delegated down. Many hindrances come from other bureaucrats. I don't know if I'd call this a third axis or a part of the second axis.
The gold standard of have-to-dos are statutes and judicial rulings. I think most everything else is flexible... if you can get it to the right high-level bureaucrat or political appointee to sign off on it. I have to imagine that, like any sufficiently sizable company with loads of legacy internal 'rules', some of them just get conveniently forgotten anyway, unless some top-floor Joe gets a bee in his bonnet about it. So the question is what does the ratio of have-to-dos to flexible look like for different agencies? Of course, this plays into Scott's point; the measurement here is difficult - and different from just counting the number of bureaucrats.
I think that goes back to how much one thinks that government agencies are actually responsive to political and legal forces. This is picking a different point on the 'responsiveness to political forces' scale.
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