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When politicians reshape public health agencies, scientists resist changes and, if possible, leave. Those shifts make it harder for agencies to fight future public health threats. This Element focuses on the tension between scientists and managerial control in the policy process, both conceptually and empirically. It centers on a failed attempt to reorganize the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because many of the gains in longevity and health quality result from the work of public health agencies, public health scientists and practitioners are the frontline producers of public health.

Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Preface -- 1 Presidential Leadership and Policy Construction -- 2 Presidential Rhetoric as Policy Leadership -- 3 A Presidential History of the War on Drugs -- 4 The Words of War: Political Rhetoric and the War on Drugs -- 5 Presidential Policy Leadership and Federal Enforcement: The Drug Enforcement Administration -- 6 For the People: The U.S. Attorneys and the Impact of Executive Signals on Prosecutorial Priorities -- 7 Taking It to the States: Testing the Limits of Presidential Influence and State Drug Enforcement

Modern American public welfare agencies are the results of the continual reorganization of multiple agencies, departments, and programs. I develop four themes about the micro-foundations of reorganization in this article to illustrate how politics intersect with agency structure and the reshaping of the national bureaucracy. The empirical part of this article examines President Dwight D. Eisenhower's assembling of a national health, education, and public welfare agency. The creation of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) in 1953 represents a critical juncture in that evolutionary process.

AbstractAll countries with complex geographies must extend national power to local areas. Field administration is a primitive in government: it is inevitable in modern national governments, but its variety and impact is rarely discussed in modern public administration. Building on the work of James Fesler and formal results on agenda-setting in organizations, this article demonstrates dilemmas in the use of historically important, widespread mechanisms for designing the field operations of national governments. The experiences of different nation-states provide context for these dilemmas. How governments address these dilemmas shapes policy implementation and the performance of national governments.

Agencies must simultaneously weigh technical information along with the political and distributive consequences of their decisions. In a study of the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) implementation of federal pesticide regulations, I show that the EPA accounts for both case and constituency factors. I assess the effects of both uncertainty and information in agency decisions. I offer the use of a multilevel model with three types of random effects to capture specific case factors (the crop, the pest, and the pesticide) to account for unobservable heterogeneity in outcomes. The models show that the impacts of uncertainty and information depend on the decision environment. Adapted from the source document.

Recent studies have documented how presidents issue signing statements. A president might try to bend policy closer to his own position through shaping how bureaucrats use their discretion to implement a law. Later in time, it may serve as a defense if it shapes how judges decide whether a particular interpretation is consistent with the Constitution. A president may construct more detailed and complex statements when his ideal point is distant from Congress. I test this hypothesis and others using data from the George W. Bush administration between 2001 and 2006. Both the number of objections applied to a given bill and their complexity increase when the president is distant from Congress.