Who Controls Agencies, and Who Agencies Answer To

Matt Yglesias says he'd be fine with a political system that gave the party in power in the legislature and the executive branch the ability to govern much more aggressively, even if it means accepting the rollback of programs he likes when administrations switch. He writes:

If we switch to a set of rules where a party that wins an election gets to govern, then I'm fine with those rules applying in an even-handed way.

I actually think such a system would be beneficial in both directions. If it were easier to enact and expand programs, but also easier to cut and eliminate programs then I think that on net we would end up with more and bigger good programs and fewer and smaller bad programs. In the UK where there are very few veto points, you don't really see policy see-sawing back and forth. Many Labour initiatives (NHS, etc.) stand the test of time, but when the Tories manage to sell the public of axing something it tends not to come back. To my way of thinking, that's a beneficial dynamic.

One of the points James Q. Wilson makes in Bureaucracy is that in the UK, executive agencies are much more directly responsive to whoever the current prime minister is, because the prime minister and the dominant party in parliament by design work in concert. So it's not simply easier for the legislature and the executive to make a joint decision about what they want from agencies and programs, but it's easier for agencies to manage what the legislature and the executive want from them: they're not pulled back and forth between competing expectations that carry equal opportunities of sanction and reward.