Julie E. Cohen (Georgetown University Law Center), Paul Ohm (Georgetown University Law Center), Meg Leta Jones (Georgetown University – Communication, Culture, and Technology Program), and Nina-Simone Edwards (Georgetown University Law Center) have posted Legitimacy and Accountability in the Information-Era Administrative State on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This report is part of a broader project to redefine the administrative state’s role in effective governance. It considers mechanisms and arrangements for constraining and overseeing administrative action.
We begin by canvassing a number of significant threats to administrative legitimacy and accountability. In brief, the current assault on administrative institutions and the rapid influx of automated “solutions” have exacerbated the problems of a system that was already buckling under the strains of functional opacity, technical opacity, unequal access and influence, process proliferation and paralysis, and inaction.
An overarching reason for the legitimacy and accountability challenges confronting the administrative state is a paradigm for administrative legitimacy and accountability that is court-centered and no longer fit for purpose. We describe two core requirements of legitimacy and accountability—which, as we will explain, are interdependent concepts—and then articulate three component requirements—transparency and demystification, care and respect, and oversight—that are designed to give those concepts more concrete and specific meaning.
Next, we present recommendations for operationalizing the criteria of legitimacy and accountability and the component requirements of transparency and demystification, care and respect, and oversight across the domains of policymaking, enforcement, citizen-focused decision-making, and government technology and data.
Finally, to help implement those recommendations, we recommend creating two new offices with cross-cutting authority: a government information commission to ensure better and more consistent accountability and an Office of Government Integrity to oversee uses—and detect and disclose misuses and abuses—of government technical systems and data. In addition, we recommend revised and streamlined processes for hiring into agency civil service positions.
Recommended!
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