The administrative state faces a legitimacy crisis: so fix Congress!? (Philip A. Wallach, Brookings)

In my new Center for Effective Public Management paper, “The administrative state’s legitimacy crisis,” I argue that Americans’ anxieties about our sprawling, largely impenetrable bureaucracy pose a major challenge to the effective working of our government. This work is largely critical in orientation, contending that technocratic defenses of our current arrangements are complacent about citizens’ sense of alienation while at the same time insisting that populists’ efforts to simply shake free of the administrative state produce only more disappointment and cynicism. I try to sketch out a sensible middle way that values coping, competence, and compromise and functions through intermediation and incrementalism.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/fixgov/posts/2016/04/20-administrative-state-legitimacy-wallach