The executive order process can be a long and complicated one, as directives may wind their way through various agencies before finding their way onto the president’s desk. Even after these orders have been issued, federal agencies will have a wide degree of latitude under certain conditions as it pertains to implementing them. In this article, I study the history of three separate presidential directives, two dealing specifically with environmental issues and one with general regulatory issues, in order to provide a picture of the process from inception to implementation. I consider three cases and explore the factors that drive presidents in choosing when or whether to issue an order and those that drive federal agencies to react as they do. This article encourages scholars to reconsider what they consider “unilateral,” pointing to the instances in which presidents must engage in bargaining within the executive branch they ostensibly head.

At the behest of the Roosevelt administration in 1935, the U.S. Senate established a special committee to investigate lobbying activities by opponents of the “death sentence” of the Public Utility Holding Company Bill. Chaired by Hugo L. Black (D-Ala.), the “Black Committee” expanded its mission into a more general probe of anti–New Deal organizations and individuals. The committee used highly intrusive methods, notably catch-all dragnet subpoenas, to secure evidence. It worked closely with the IRS for access to tax returns and with the FCC to obtain copies of millions of telegrams. When the telegram search became public information, there was a major backlash from the press, Congress, and the courts. Court rulings in 1936, resulting from suits by William Randolph Hearst and others, not only limited the committee’s powers but provided important checks for future investigators, including Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Scholars point out a tension between racial justice and disability rights activism. Although racial minorities are more likely to become disabled than whites, both disability activism and the historiography of disability politics tend to focus on the experience and achievements of whites. This article examines how disability rights activists of the 1970s sought to build a united movement of all people with disabilities and explains why these efforts were unable to overcome cleavages predicated on race. Activists drew from New Left ideas of community and self-help as well as the New Right rhetoric of market freedoms to articulate a vision of liberation for people with disabilities. Though they yearned for racial solidarity, in practice, activists could not overcome institutions that separated antipoverty and racial politics from disability policy, nor could they figure out how to incorporate minority voices in an identity-based movement forged around disability rather than color.

With regulatory reform again on the presidential agenda, the history of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) provides a useful case study of organizational effectiveness. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan charged OIRA with imposing cost-benefit analysis on agency regulations, formalizing a new process of centralized regulatory review. But OIRA’s effectiveness flowed less from a single executive order than from the previous decade of presidential experimentation with regulatory review and Reagan’s continued investment in its institutionalization. This article draws extensively on archival documents to understand how regulatory review established itself as a constant of presidential management through the development of attributes such as staff capacity, organizational complexity, bureaucratic leverage, and reputation. Today’s policymakers should heed broader lessons for enhancing organizational effectiveness: singular structural and procedural changes are necessary, but not sufficient, for achieving reform.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson, the successor of John F. Kennedy, signed into law the largest tax cut in U.S. history until 1981, the so-called Kennedy–Johnson tax cut. Many scholars have evaluated it as representative Keynesian tax policy; this article focuses on the effort of the Treasury Department, tax experts such as Stanley S. Surrey and Wilbur D. Mills, the chairman of House Committee on Ways and Means, to reform the federal income tax system comprehensively—making it simpler, fairer, and more equitable—and their defeat by the 1964 tax cut. Through the policymaking and legislative process, the Kennedy administration’s Council Economic Advisers defeated the Treasury and Surrey by domesticating Keynes’s ideas on tax policy. Until the 1964 passage of the tax cut, Mills, with his inconsistent action, abandoned the accomplishment of their ideal tax reform.

Traditional accounts of the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments to the U.S. Constitution largely ignore the role of the major political parties. We argue that partisan politics was an integral part of the constitutional politics of this period. The need to manage divisions within both parties’ electoral coalitions during the transition from the third to the fourth-party systems led to the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment without support from either national party. While most accounts trace prohibition’s demise to widespread noncompliance and the graft it generated, we argue that elite congressional support for prohibition gave way when civil service reforms removed federal prohibition agents as patronage resources. We also argue that by giving states control of designing state conventions, and thereby risking state malapportionment of conventions, Democrats succeeded in overcoming the traditional fissures that divided their southern and northern wings.

During the last twenty years, several writers have drawn attention to the role played by friendly societies and other mutual-aid organizations in the development of Britain’s welfare state. Proponents of mutual aid have argued that these organizations were part of the rich associational culture of working-class life; that they represented a viable alternative to state welfare; and that they were eventually undermined by it. However, this article highlights the challenges that these organizations were already facing toward the end of the nineteenth century as a result of changes in working-class culture and the rise of more commercial insurance agencies. It suggests that the rise of state welfare was not so much a cause of these difficulties as a response to them. It also examines the role that friendly societies played in the expansion of welfare services after 1914 and their attitude to calls for further expansion before 1945.

Efforts to modernize public assistance via the Social Security Act of 1935 met significant opposition from states. One manifestation of that resistance was state responsible relative laws in the Old Age Assistance program. Responsible relative laws enforced support by adult children as an eligibility requirement; applicants with children deemed able to provide support were either denied aid, or the grant awarded was reduced. These laws are an example of parent dependency policies that sought to enforce or encourage family members, particularly adult children, to support parents in need. States sought to ensure that all financial resources were exhausted before public funds were spent on OAA. Responsible relative laws were an arena of public assistance that remained under state discretion, and many states used them to control costs and contest federal efforts to modernize relief programs and limit state and local authority.

This article offers the first comprehensive history of the development of mandatory disclosure rules for the cost of consumer credit. In contrast to prior studies, which begin with the creation of federal disclosure rules in 1968, this story starts with state-level laws that were drafted before World War I. By looking back over a longer time period, it reveals the challenges involved in defining “truth” in lending, and how the perceived purpose of a regulatory technique like mandatory disclosure may change over time. Although the modern APR disclosure metric has come to seem natural and inevitable, history shows that lenders and policymakers once hotly debated the design of disclosure rules, with each faction claiming the mantle of “truth.” Moreover, policymakers did not always view disclosure as a means to increase price competition, obviating the need for direct price controls. Disclosure was once a complement to usury laws, rather than a substitute.

During the later years of the Great Depression, birth control advocates in the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA) developed a program to distribute birth control among California’s migrant workers. In order to reach the migrants, these advocates reached out to the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal agency that was establishing its own programs to “rehabilitate” migrant families. Though the top levels of the FSA were wary of becoming publicly involved with the birth control movement, they lent their tacit support to the program. The resulting “semiofficial” program to bring birth control to California’s poor relied heavily on the support of local administrators and professionals. This article examines the on-the-ground operations of this project; in doing so, it challenges the traditional top-down narrative of the New Deal and explores how the forging of alliances at the local level reshaped the political landscape.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan created a task force intended to gain the initiative on immigration reform. But immigration reform presented obstacles to his political stance in repudiation of his Democratic predecessors. After four years of wrangling, internally as well as with Congress, many on the Reagan team viewed the immigration task force as having shackled the president to an unwinnable issue. Frustrated politically, Reagan aides shifted focus to an emerging presidential tactic—the signing statement. This allowed the president to sign the Immigration Reform and Control Act while setting important precedents for his larger conservative agenda. The trajectory from presidential task force to presidential signing statement on immigration reform reveals the challenges Reagan faced on policy issues outside his core priorities, and also the development of a tactic to maneuver through the challenges. Immigration reform became less about immigration than about serving the administration’s larger core priorities.

This article evaluates the policy positions of President James Buchanan through the concept of latent opinion, or politicians worrying less about current public opinion and more about what it will be at the next election. Though Buchanan is often viewed as disconnected from the public’s opinions, the evidence shows that his positions on Kansas statehood and the acquisition of Cuba (or Mexican territory) were shaped by his perceptions of, and concerns over, what future public opinion would be in 1860. Though Buchanan was ultimately unsuccessful on both fronts, this study reveals that he was not simply unresponsive to public opinion, which is the common interpretation. Instead, the president’s policy positions were firmly tied to his views on latent opinion. Thus, the findings add a new dimension to scholarly understandings of James Buchanan’s policy priorities while displaying how latent opinion can be a beneficial construct in policy history.

Scholars of social policy development in the United States and elsewhere have recently focused on the historical and contemporary importance of complex, delegated welfare state governance. In this article, I outline the emergence of a coordinated urban welfare state in the city of Toronto between 1870 and 1929, describing the creation of both public and private forms of coordination and centralization. I argue that we must understand social policy development in this period as resulting from the interaction of three policy coalitions: municipal traditionalists, municipal progressives, and social work professionals, and that social policy centralization occurred as a result of an alliance between municipal progressives and social work professionals. To explain the long-term development of social policy in Canada and elsewhere, I argue, we must understand the interaction among these internal coalitions in the social policy field and the ways that broader fiscal and cultural changes strengthened or weakened each coalition over time.

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is one of the most utilized models in water policy and administration. One of the crucial components in IWRM is collaboration, where multiple stakeholders negotiate solutions. This article explores the role of collaboration in one of the most contentious water conflicts in the nation—the Klamath River. The range of stakeholders is enormous and complex, including Indian tribes, farmers, fishermen, recreationists, environmentalists, advocates of endangered species, two states, and multiple federal agencies. The parties in the Klamath Basin negotiated three settlements to resolve many of the major issues. However, the U.S. Congress failed to approve the settlements in late 2015, effectively ending this long-term effort to resolve these vexing issues through collaborative negotiations. This conflict is analyzed using a multimethod approach, and discusses how the failure of the settlement process can provide insights into the role of collaboration in IWRM, and suggests refinements to the model.

Recognizing public education as a public good, policymakers have focused on providing those with direct interest in public schools opportunities to influence educational policy making. In the nineteenth century, this often meant providing women the right to vote on and to hold public school offices. Frequently conflated, suffrage and public office holding are actually two different, yet related, citizenship rights. Using state and territorial legislative records as a starting place, this article redefines the understanding of school suffrage by complicating the traditional narrative relative to its relationship with full woman suffrage. In doing so, it also provides evidence that before 1900 women were granted the right to hold public education offices, ultimately being elected in forty-three of forty-eight states before the twentieth century, thus broadening the understanding of women’s political agency prior to attaining full suffrage.

The 1960s was a period of political opening for employment policy, when important questions about unemployment and economic insecurity were debated and a number of ambitious policies were enacted. Yet the Great Society’s employment policy agenda was also fundamentally limited in scope; it comprised interventions that reinforced rather than altered existing labor market mechanisms. Previous work suggests that primarily institutional factors were responsible for this constraint. By contrast, I contend that in addition to institutional factors, there was an ideological boundary condition on the era’s employment policy. The Johnson administration’s policymakers conformed to aspects of the liberal tradition in America, which limited policy options as well as the efficiency and efficacy of implemented policy.

This article examines New Deal public works agencies’ pivotal contributions to American aeronautical development, arguing that their creation of aviation-related infrastructure offers powerful evidence of the New Deal’s success in remaking the American landscape and fostering economic growth. Organizations such as the Civil Works Agency, the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration built or improved almost every contemporary U.S. airport, funding improvements that created the foundations of America’s modern air transport network. Much more than make-work endeavors, these efforts reflected New Dealers’ desire to use public works to create worthwhile products. These policies highlight the sophistication with which the New Deal promoted economic development, and belie the image of public works agencies privileging short-term employment to the detriment of economic gain. Airport terminals, runways, hangers, and countless other aviation-related improvements represent some of the New Deal’s most significant physical legacies, highlighting the Roosevelt administrations’ vital contributions to aeronautical development.

Although women have made tremendous gains at work, a striking degree of sex segregation still exists. For a generation of women who were working in low-paying, administrative support positions during the promising era of Title VII, affirmative action did not offer upward mobility. In the 1970s, as employers and regulators began implementing affirmative action amid the gendered structure of internal labor markets, women who were already in clerical roles remained outside the managerial pipeline. Women in 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, sought to bridge the gap between female-dominated clerical and male-dominated managerial ladders using collective action. Yet business and government did not enforce affirmative action such that the clustering of women in low-paid clerical positions constituted discrimination on the basis of sex. Work experience on the clerical ladder remains inadequate training for positions on the managerial ladder.

The first response to AIDS in Ireland emerged from within a radical, socialist, and predominantly nationalist wing of the gay rights movement in 1985. At a time when homosexual acts were criminalized, the Irish state operated a policy of protracted nonengagement with Gay Health Action, while covertly supporting selected health-promotion activities. As international momentum unified around a response to the AIDS crisis characterized by value-neutral public health principles, the Irish State, and particularly the statutory health sector, was compelled to balance the views of a conservative voting majority at home with the liberal consensus that was defining the response internationally. AIDS was a catalyst for change throughout the world and Gay Health Action was at the forefront of that transformative movement in Ireland. At the outbreak of AIDS, the gay community was an “invisible minority” that by 1990 had pushed the boundaries of sexual health discourse to herald a more liberal age.

Between the 1930s and early 1960s, U.S. economic policy underwent an important transformation, described by economist Herbert Stein as “The Fiscal Revolution in America.” During those years, policymakers utilized Keynesian ideas to promote prosperity, and the fiscal revolution reached its peak after John F. Kennedy proposed a growth-boosting tax cut despite the unprecedented peacetime consequence of running a deficit in nonrecession conditions. This article explores how that revolution developed during the postwar period. It challenges the argument that the business community shaped and consolidated the fiscal revolution in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Instead, this article shows that liberal economists played a crucial role in fashioning Keynesianism’s postwar consolidation, so much so that the brand of that doctrine implemented in the early 1960s owed much to their efforts and was significantly different to the one championed by the business community.