Presidents possess vast authority over policies and outcomes. Recent studies suggest the public checks this unilateralism through expressive opinions and political participation. We reevaluate this accountability link with a preregistered panel survey that incorporates a number of design and conceptual improvements over existing experimental studies. Our findings reveal a more complex relationship between presidential actions and public opinion. We find no evidence that the public reacts negatively to unilateralism – and some evidence they react positively. Respondents, however, may punish an incumbent for failing to implement the proposed policy change. While such a result suggests that the public can hold presidents accountable, we close by discussing how a lack of information likely renders this check moot.

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.

Environmental justice (EJ) has represented an important equity challenge in policymaking for decades. President Clinton’s executive order (EO) 12898 in 1994 represented a significant federal action, requiring agencies to account for EJ issues in new rulemakings. We examine the impact of EO 12898 within the larger question of how EO are implemented in complex policymaking. We argue that presidential preferences will affect bureaucratic responsiveness and fire alarm oversight. However, EJ policy complexity produces uncertainty leading to bureaucratic risk aversion, constraining presidential efforts to steer policy. We utilise an original data set of nearly 2,000 final federal agency rules citing EO 12898 and find significant variation in its utilisation across administrations. Uncertainty over the nature of the order has an important influence on bureaucratic responsiveness. Our findings are instructive for the twin influences of political control and policy-making uncertainty and raise useful questions for future EJ and policy implementation research.