Chapter 11 Quiz — The Bureaucracy
A short self-check covering the institutional vocabulary, the doctrinal landscape, and the contested questions of the modern administrative state. Answers and brief explanations follow each section.
Multiple choice (12 questions)
1. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 was enacted in direct response to:
A. The 1929 stock market crash B. The 1881 assassination of President James Garfield by a disappointed office-seeker C. President Andrew Jackson's introduction of the spoils system in 1829 D. Watergate-era civil-service abuses
Answer: B. Garfield's assassination by Charles Guiteau crystallized public support for ending spoils-based federal hiring. Initial coverage was about 10% of federal jobs.
2. The Hatch Act of 1939 primarily restricts:
A. The right of federal employees to vote in partisan elections B. The political activities of federal employees, including running for partisan office and soliciting campaign contributions C. The ability of federal contractors to lobby Congress D. The use of federal funds for partisan media buys
Answer: B. The Hatch Act allows federal employees to vote and hold opinions but bars them from running for partisan office or using their position for political purposes. It was substantially amended in 1993 to permit some off-duty political activity.
3. Schedule F, established by Executive Order 13957 (October 2020) and revived in modified form in 2025:
A. Eliminates the General Schedule pay system entirely B. Reclassifies certain "policy-determining or policy-advocating" positions out of the competitive service so employees in them can be removed without standard procedural protections C. Caps the size of the Senior Executive Service at 5,000 positions D. Mandates retirement at age 65 for all civil servants
Answer: B. Schedule F is the most contested civil-service question of the 2020s. The chapter presents both the case for (presidential accountability over policy implementers) and against (risk of reverting to spoils-system dynamics).
4. Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935) held that:
A. President Roosevelt could fire any executive-branch official at will B. The President could not remove an FTC Commissioner at will because the FTC was a "quasi-legislative" and "quasi-judicial" body Congress had legitimately insulated from removal C. The Federal Trade Commission was unconstitutional D. Independent agencies must have unitary administrators
Answer: B. Humphrey's is the constitutional foundation for for-cause removal protection on multimember regulatory commissions. Seila Law (2020) limited it without overruling it.
5. Seila Law LLC v. CFPB (2020) held that:
A. The CFPB was unconstitutional in its entirety B. For-cause removal protection for the single-administrator CFPB Director was unconstitutional, because the Director exercised significant executive power without being removable by the President C. The Dodd-Frank Act was unconstitutional D. Humphrey's Executor was overruled
Answer: B. Seila did not overrule Humphrey's but limited it: for-cause protection survives for multimember commissions exercising quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial power, but not for single-administrator agencies wielding significant executive power.
6. Under the Administrative Procedure Act (1946), the standard sequence for issuing a binding regulation is:
A. Final rule, then comment, then judicial review B. Statutory authority, notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), public comment period, OIRA review for economically significant rules, final rule, judicial review C. Executive order, congressional approval, agency action D. Agency rulemaking is exempt from procedural requirements
Answer: B. This is "notice-and-comment rulemaking" under APA Section 553. Economically significant rules ($100M+ annual impact) also go through OIRA review under Executive Order 12866.
7. OIRA (the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) sits within:
A. The Department of Justice B. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) within the Executive Office of the President C. The Government Accountability Office D. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Answer: B. OIRA centralizes White House review of significant rules. Created in 1980 (Paperwork Reduction Act), expanded by Reagan's EO 12291 and Clinton's EO 12866.
8. Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) established the doctrine that:
A. Courts must defer to a reasonable agency interpretation when a statute is ambiguous B. Agencies cannot interpret statutes C. Congress cannot delegate rulemaking authority D. The President can override any agency rule
Answer: A. This was the cornerstone of administrative law for forty years. Step One: did Congress directly address the question? Step Two: if statute is ambiguous, is the agency's reading reasonable?
9. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) overruled Chevron and held that:
A. Agencies cannot make any rules B. Courts decide questions of statutory interpretation using ordinary tools, without automatic deference to agencies; agency expertise still matters on factual findings C. Congress must approve every regulation D. The Supreme Court alone can interpret federal statutes
Answer: B. Loper Bright shifted statutory interpretation from agencies back to courts but did not eliminate agencies' role or invalidate existing Chevron-era rules retroactively.
10. The major-questions doctrine, as crystallized in West Virginia v. EPA (2022) and Biden v. Nebraska (2023):
A. Requires Congress to vote on every federal regulation B. Requires clear congressional authorization when an agency claims power to decide a question of vast economic and political significance C. Permits agencies to claim broad powers under any statute D. Applies only to environmental regulations
Answer: B. The doctrine has been used to invalidate the Clean Power Plan, the OSHA vaccinate-or-test mandate, the CDC eviction moratorium, and the Biden student-loan forgiveness program — under both Democratic and Republican administrations the principle has cut against agency overreach.
11. Pressman and Wildavsky's 1973 book Implementation is best understood as:
A. A defense of the administrative state B. A critique of agency capture C. A study showing that even simple programs require many consecutive bureaucratic approvals, each with some probability of failure, so multiplying approvals together drives the probability of overall success toward zero D. A theory of judicial deference
Answer: C. The Pressman-Wildavsky lesson — implementation is hard, and well-intentioned policies often fail there — is the foundational text for implementation studies in political science.
12. Paul C. Light's research at NYU on the federal "shadow workforce" estimates that, when contractors and grant-funded employees are counted alongside the visible 2.1-million civilian federal workforce, the federal government's true delivery workforce is approximately:
A. 3 million B. 5 million C. 9 million D. 15 million
Answer: C. Light's estimate of roughly 9 million captures the substantial extent to which federal work is done outside the formal civil service. This affects oversight, transparency, conflict-of-interest enforcement, and cost analysis.
Short answer (4 questions)
1. Distinguish the progressive critique of agency capture from the conservative critique of agency overreach. Give one specific example illustrating each.
Sample answer. The progressive critique holds that agencies have been captured by the industries they regulate — through the revolving door, industry-funded science, and lobbying access — and that the result is regulatory under-protection of public interests. The FAA's delegation of safety certification to Boeing engineers, which contributed to the 737 MAX crashes, is the canonical example. The SEC's failure to detect Bernie Madoff and the EPA's slowness on PFAS are similar. The conservative critique holds that agencies have expanded their reach beyond the statutory grounding Congress actually authorized, displacing the elected legislature. The Clean Power Plan (struck down in West Virginia v. EPA for attempting "generation shifting" without clear authorization), the CDC eviction moratorium (struck down for resting on a quarantine statute), and the Biden student-loan forgiveness program (struck down in Biden v. Nebraska) are canonical examples. Both critiques can be true of the same agency in different domains.
2. Why is the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act often described as a "constitution for the administrative state"?
Sample answer. The APA establishes the procedural rules governing how agencies make binding rules and adjudicate disputes — notice-and-comment rulemaking, the arbitrary-and-capricious standard for judicial review, the "decide all relevant questions of law" instruction in Section 706, exemptions and exceptions, formal versus informal procedures. Because the Constitution itself does not anticipate or regulate the modern bureaucracy, the APA functions as the structural law governing agency conduct. Loper Bright relied heavily on the APA's text in overruling Chevron.
3. What does the unitary-executive theory claim, and why does it have implications for independent agencies?
Sample answer. The theory reads Article II's Vesting Clause ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President") as requiring that all officers exercising executive power be removable by the President. Independent agencies whose heads have for-cause removal protection — historically permitted under Humphrey's Executor — sever the accountability link between the elected President and the apparatus carrying out federal policy. Seila Law and Collins v. Yellen applied this logic to single-administrator independent agencies. Whether multimember commissions (FCC, FTC, FEC, SEC, NLRB) retain Humphrey's protection is the major unresolved doctrinal question of the 2020s.
4. Explain why the Healthcare.gov launch failure of October 2013 is a useful illustration of the gap between statute and program.
Sample answer. The ACA, signed in March 2010, required HHS, CMS, IRS, and other agencies to issue thousands of regulations and to build a federal exchange website on a 42-month schedule with shifting requirements and contracted IT vendors. The October 2013 launch effectively did not function for two months — a failure of bureaucratic IT-procurement capacity, not of the statute itself. A "tech surge" rebuild brought enrollment back online; the U.S. Digital Service was created in 2014 partly in response. The episode illustrates Pressman and Wildavsky's point: a statute is words on paper; a program is what the bureaucracy actually does; capacity, project management, and procurement competence determine whether good laws produce good outcomes.