Recent years have witnessed a marked resurgence in scholarly attention to bureaucratic policymaking and its location within the broader separation-of-powers framework in which these laws are carried into effect. Such scholarship has shed important new light on such questions as the mechanisms governing congressional structuring of agency interactions over implementation, the reach of executive branch oversight of agencies through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), strategic timing of rulemaking, and the ways in which agencies use the implementation authority delegated to them by statute. Within this dialogue of political science and public administration, Samuel Workman’s The Dynamics of Bureaucracy in the U.S. Government offers new insights into the agenda-setting mechanisms of the legislative–executive interplay over policymaking in recent decades, beginning in 1983.

Important to Workman’s study is the centrality of bureaucracy to the policies that ultimately emerge in this model of American politics, rather than agencies characterized as engaging in the rote implementation of policies passed down by Congress. While models of agency implementation have served to elucidate the strategic dynamics underlying congressional strategies of legislative design and delegation, the important role that agencies maintain throughout the policy making, as well as implementing, phase, cannot be overstated, and is acknowledged fully in Workman’s theory of agenda setting. Indeed, the author notes that this key policy influence persists “even when it appears that the elected branches of government are unresponsive and macro politics seems stale” (p. 159), with members of Congress and bureaucrats both continually active in shaping the policy outcomes that we ultimately observe. And in evaluating bureaucracies’ role in this process, Workman puts forward a rich new data set comprising the coding of more than 200,000 regulations identified in the Unified Agenda, which in itself will pave the way toward understanding new sets of key questions about the American administrative state.

At the core of Workman’s analysis is the dual dynamics of the administrative state—formed by the tension between democratic authority and bureaucratic expertise—whereby agencies engage in problem solving and bottom-up influence, at which point Congress steers information processing by way of problem prioritization and agenda setting. In the first stage of the bottom-up process, bureaucracies detect and identify problems that carry policy consequences, with the necessary precondition that agencies must have the autonomy to monitor and detect problems that warrant attention across a range of issues. Bureaucracies then define the detected problem in a way that facilitates government action, attaching causes to policy consequences and potentially calling attention to some dimensions of a policy while downplaying others so as to improve the agency’s ability to influence elected officials in taking up the given issue. Having defined the issue, the bureaucracy then generates the relevant information and conveys it to elected officials.

The top-down aspect of the policymaking process here involves, in part, congressional prioritization of issues, which Workman links to the creation and authorization of bureaucracies in the first place, with congressional delegation to agencies and coordination among them. Within this agenda setting, Congress engages in the processes of issue shuffling, which influences the problems being monitored and the strength of bureaucracies’ signals about those problems, along with issue bundling, in which legislation alters the ways in which issues relate to one another, thus reshaping the composition of interests that are mobilized and the policies that are salient. And given agencies’ incentives to maintain prominence in the policy landscape, agencies often respond by recasting their agenda in terms of those issues prominent on the congressional agenda, thus “alter[ing] the interrelationship of issues on the agenda and the proximity of various bureaucracies monitoring these issues and generating the information” (p. 118). Such processes of congressional issue prioritization produce direct competition among agencies monitoring issues and generating information utilized by Congress. Thus, Workman’s treatment pushes the literature to consider a more nuanced dynamic interplay between Congress and agencies in policymaking, with both top-down and bottom-up processes shaping the institutions’ information environment and the policy agenda that ultimately is set.

Rather than providing the familiar scenario of Democratic control of bureaucracy associated with pro-regulation versus Republican control with deregulation—such as with the “regulatory relief” efforts of the 1980s—Workman emphasizes the strong regulatory role that agencies maintain throughout the time series. A challenge, with no easy solution, is ascertaining the extent to which conservative agencies, while still taking regulatory action, were in fact scaling back, relative to proposed policy changes. An analog to this concept in the context of appropriations politics is the allocation of funds at levels lower than those requested, potentially not in keeping with increased regulatory responsibilities but nevertheless not a recission either. In the context of agency policymaking, while not engaging in outright retrenchment, a key omitted variable is interest groups’ and others’ demands for regulatory action, which can serve as a useful baseline in evaluating Democratic- and Republican-controlled agencies’ responsiveness in policymaking. This can be particularly salient in those cases in which appointees are less supportive of the overarching mission of the agency in which they operate, a setting in which we might expect agenda-setting interactions to be different from those under friendlier agency leadership.

Workman demonstrates in a number of instances marked disjunctures in signaling by bureaucracies, congressional prioritization of issues, and bureaucratic issue attention under conditions of Democratic versus Republican control of Congress, with the change-point being the Republican Party’s sweeping victories in the 1994 midterm elections with its Contract with America. A fruitful avenue for future research would be to disentangle these dynamics further in order to evaluate in a more nuanced manner the precise political configurations in which the institutions operate. That is, from 1983 to 1994, there is divided partisan control of Congress with a Republican executive branch (1983–86); a unified Democratic Congress with a Republican executive branch (1987–92); a unified Democratic Congress with a Democratic executive branch (1993–94); a unified Republican Congress with a Democratic executive branch (1995–2000); and a unified Republican Congress with a Republican branch (2001–06). Each of these different configurations can, in ways central to Workman’s theory, reshape the choice sets available to Congress and bureaucracies and the policies that ultimately emerge through these institutional interactions.

For example, given asymmetric dynamics of congressional control of more regulatory versus deregulatory agencies (such as with Congress’s ability to exercise the power of the purse to preclude more than to spur regulatory action), the agenda-setting processes should likewise be affected by that composition of institutional preferences. And while both Democratic- and Republican-controlled Congresses are held accountable for taking action with respect to passing legislation and regulating policy, and Democratic- and Republican-controlled agencies pass regulations, the content of that policy is hardly identical under different administrations and should influence the ways in which the branches interact over the policy agenda. Understanding these more fine-grained dynamics would go a long way toward making more precise predictions as to congressional coalitions’ varied propensity to define and monitor problems in certain ways, and to engage in the processes of issue shuffling and bundling in accordance with Workman’s theory.

To be sure, all models necessarily require simplifying assumptions, and there are limits to what any one treatise can alone accomplish. The limitations that I have addressed here offer guidance as to future directions in which to consider the ongoing interbranch interactions that characterize policymaking in the United States, and to evaluate the regulatory (and deregulatory) processes at work over time. Workman’s evaluation makes an important, novel advance in our understanding of the dynamic relationship between Congress and bureaucracies as they work to identify, frame, and respond to policy problems, and his rich empirical contributions lay the groundwork for further expanding our understanding of these policymaking processes.