A core debate in the bureaucratic politics literature concerns the extent to which the president and Congress can exert control over the federal bureaucracy in order to shape the direction of public policy. James Cox's book analyzes congressional reauthorization power across numerous federal agencies to expand scholarly knowledge about congressional control of the bureaucracy. Reauthorization is a policy tool that allows Congress to reassess the status of existing policy. Theoretically, this tool allows Congress to prevent the president and the federal bureaucracy from drifting away from the original intent of legislation. However, Cox explains that Congress often proceeds with extreme caution when deciding whether to use this policy tool, because limited resources prevent it from monitoring all of the implementation activities of federal agencies. Therefore, Congress must consider the numerous costs and benefits associated with providing a federal agency with permanent or temporary authorization.

Congress often delegates authority to the bureaucracy regarding the specifics of public policy implementation. Cox argues that “enacting coalitions” that are responsible for the passage of legislation have a vested interest in protecting their policy achievements during the implementation stage. However, these enacting coalitions are limited in their ability to control policy implementation because they can encounter varying degrees of conflict and uncertainty within the political environment. As a result, there is a “trade-off” that influences the decisions of enacting coalitions regarding whether they should provide federal agencies with temporary or permanent authorization. Specifically, these coalitions seek to reduce the level of conflict and uncertainty that exists among their own members. Enacting coalitions also go to great lengths in attempting to prevent bureaucratic agencies from implementing policy in a manner that strays from their own policy preferences.

Cox uses a transaction cost framework to develop four hypotheses to determine the types of conditions that must exist in the political environment in order for Congress to provide federal agencies with temporary authorization. According to Cox, “enacting coalitions design governance structures as a way to reduce enforcement costs of legislative agreements” (p. 105). Reauthorization authority refers to just one type of governance structure. The core findings of his study indicate that Congress is less willing to use temporary authorizations when there is an increase in political conflict, especially when there is conflict within a specific congressional committee. However, Congress is likely to use temporary authorizations to counteract attempts by presidents that seek to influence the direction of implementation in agencies, especially with respect to foreign and defense policy (pp. 124–26). In sum, Congress weighs the costs and benefits of using reauthorization authority, and if the political costs are too high, the members will likely refrain from using temporary authorization (p. 81).

Cox's findings also demonstrate that since 1960, Congress has been more active in providing temporary authorizations for new federal agencies than between 1947 and 1960. The 1970s and 1980s marked the time period when Congress was the most active in providing new federal agencies with temporary authorizations; however, this trend started to decline during the 1990s (p. 56).

A major weakness of the book is that there is a lack of rigor in both the quantitative and qualitative analyses. For example, the author uses a case study method in Chapter 5 to analyze 16 federal agencies that Congress changed from a permanent to a temporary authorization. These case studies are not very rich in contextual details because the analysis focused on too many agencies in a short amount of space, rather than providing an in-depth discussion of a smaller set of agencies. For example, the Coast Guard was analyzed within a space of a few sentences (p. 71). The use of 16 agencies allows Cox to search for patterns of congressional reauthorization activity across multiple agencies. However, I found it difficult to understand how he reached some of his conclusions on the basis of the thin details that he provides in these case studies.

The quantitative sections also suffered from a lack of rigor because there were several important details that Cox left out of his research design when analyzing congressional reauthorizations. For example, he fails to explain why he chose a set of laws that the 100th and 101st Congresses (as opposed to more recent Congresses) passed in order to test his hypotheses. We do not even know if laws included in the analysis reflect a representative sample that would allow him to reach tentative generalizations about reathorization authority. Furthermore, in Chapter 6, he classifies federal agencies as either very successful, somewhat successful, or unsuccessful according to whether Congress passed an agency's reauthorization legislation (p. 85). This section of the analysis is very unclear because the author does not adequately differentiate between these three categories. As a result, the reader is left in the dark about the details of the criteria that he used to classify federal agencies into these categories.

Reviewing Delegation is very readable, and it provides scholars with a useful overview of the strategic nature of reauthorization power. The existing literature on congressional control of the bureaucracy often emphasizes the importance of oversight and budget powers as the key mechanisms that Congress has at its disposal to control policy implementation. Cox reminds scholars that congressional reauthorization authority is another viable and powerful tool in the congressional arsenal for controlling the federal bureaucracy.