Insiders Talk: Guide to Executive Branch Agency Rulemaking: Policy, Procedure, Participation, and Post-Promulgation Appeal

Guide to Executive Branch Agency Rulemakingtrains advocates how to influence the adoption of rules and regulations enforceable on the public. Agency advocacy practice stands upon four principles:
"The execution of laws is more important than the making of them." (Thomas Jefferson) Rather than ending the regulatory process, a statute initiates a new one, that is, agency adoption of administrative laws. You don't have a law until the agency tells you that you have a law. And you don't know what a law means until it tells you what it means. Agencies do both through rulemaking. The real law, that is, law that impacts lives, is found not in broad-brush statutes but in detailed agency rules and enforcement thereof. For every page of legislature-made law, agencies can enact ten pages of highly detailed agency-made law. In other words, 90 percent of the body of regulatory law is written by executive branch agencies. What the legislature did an executive agency exercising its discretion can undo via rulemaking, and what the legislature wouldn't do, an executive agency might. Tens of thousands of regulatory agencies, departments, boards, and commissions, spending billions of dollars annually, with millions of state employees form the administrative state. In terms of money, staff numbers, reach, and authority the administrative state dwarfs the executive, legislative, and judicial branches combined. Its size, power, wealth, and reach are so substantial it is functionally the fourth branch of government.

The strategies, skills, and techniques provided by this manual equip advocates to influence agencies toward promulgating rules that more fully acknowledge and take into account their principals' interests.