The Fettered Presidency

This book addresses the proliferation of legal constraints on policymaking in the executive branch of the federal government and highlights the risks and dangers this poses for public policy. Laws that limit executive discretion reduce the protections of individual liberty and equally cripple the efficient pursuit of national goals. Good government requires a vibrant executive branch free of improper constraints. Forming a background to this book are the grand questions that echo through our history-the proper balances to strike in government between leadership and accountability, purpose and form, law and discretion.

The focus of the book itself is more topical. Many contributors are less engaged by timeless truths than by immediate frustrations. This volume, which includes the views of many high-ranking officials in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, is also a record of the worries expressed by thoughtful participants and observers of the governmental machine in the waning months of the Reagan administration.

The timing of this publication is fortuitous. The frustrations within the executive branch expressed by many of the authors are set in sharp relief by recent events. In some contrast to the first years of the Reagan presidency, in its later years the administration seemed almost paralyzed by the bitter recriminations following the revelations in the fall of 1986 that it had secretly sold arms to Iran and channeled funds to the contra forces in Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua. These "scandals" dominated congressional and media attention through much of 1987; their snowballing effect for a time evoked comparisons with the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. Although the storm had abated a good deal by the spring of 1988, the Reagan administration seemed to have lost its earlier sense of energy and direction, evoking comparisons with the last year of the Jimmy Carter administration.

Much of the discussion, therefore, is weighed down with the oppressive sense that after all its earlier successes, the Reagan administration, too, had finally fallen victim to the mysterious political curse that had brought down each of its predecessors of the previous two decades. This curse, of course, relates to the general theme of a fettered executive branch and how legal constraints adversely affect its performance and thus the performance of government generally.

The purpose here is not to evaluate the policy record of the Reagan administration but to explore the institutional obstacles it faced in implementing those policies. From this point of view, it was appropriate that many of the contributors are generally sympathetic or at least not determinedly hostile to the policy aims of the Reagan administration. Though the majority of the contributors had been actively involved in the major policy battles of the 1980s, the discussion did not revive the acrimony of those struggles. Debate tends to focus, as we had hoped, not on the propriety of the administration's goals but on the soundness of its tactics and methods given the institutional and political realities of the 1980s. The true center of attention is not the Reagan administration itself but the character of this larger operating environment for executive policy.

This volume draws on experiences in a wide range of policy fields, from the high cost of the system of Pentagon weapons procurement and the constraints on covert intelligence operations to the policy convolutions in the regulation of automobile fuel consumption standards and the provision of legal services to the poor. The contributors were a mixture of engaged policy makers and academic observers, specialists and generalists, skeptics and idealists. And for better or for worse, perceptions of what happened in the 1980s are bound to have a decisive influence on the perspectives that Washington policy makers take with them into the 1990s.