University of Michigan Law School University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository Law & Economics Working Papers 1-1-2013 Offices of Goodness: Influence Without Authority in Federal Agencies Margo Schlanger University of Michigan Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.law.umich.edu/law_econ_current Part of the Administrative Law Commons, and the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons Working Paper Citation Schlanger, Margo, "Offices of Goodness: Influence Without Authority in Federal Agencies" (2013). Law & Economics Working Papers. Paper 91. http://repository.law.umich.edu/law_econ_current/91 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Law & Economics Working Papers by an authorized administrator of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Schlanger: Offices of Goodness: Influence without Authority in Federal Agencies By Margo Schlanger Draft (September 9, 2013) Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 I. What is an Office of Goodness? ...............................................................................................6 A. Key Characteristics ............................................................................................................ 6 B. What is the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties? .......................................... 7 II. What do Offices of Goodness Do? Four CRCL Vignettes. ..................................................10 A. DHS and Occupy ............................................................................................................. 10 B. Laptop Searches .............................................................................................................. 17 C. Border Patrol and Interpretation ...................................................................................... 23 D. The NCTC AG Guidelines .............................................................................................. 29 III. Tools Available to Offices of Goodness. ...............................................................................32 A. Preventive tools ............................................................................................................... 32 (1) Inclusion in working groups .................................................................................... 32 (2) Clearance authority. ................................................................................................. 33 (3) Advice.. .................................................................................................................... 34 (4) Training and technical assistance............................................................................. 34 B. Responsive tools .............................................................................................................. 35 (1) Program or operational review................................................................................. 35 (2) Complaint investigation. .......................................................................................... 36 C. Boundary-spanning tools ................................................................................................. 37 (1) Outreach.. ................................................................................................................. 37 (2) Document generation. .............................................................................................. 38 (3) Congressional reporting.. ......................................................................................... 38 IV. What Do Offices of Goodness Need? ....................................................................................39 A. Influence .......................................................................................................................... 41 B. Commitment .................................................................................................................... 47 Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................50 Published by University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository, 2013 1 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2322797 Law & Economics Working Papers, Art. 91 [2013] Schlanger, Offices of Goodness. DRAFT (September 9, 2013) . Offices of Goodness: Influence without Authority in Federal Agencies By Margo Schlanger* Draft (September 9, 2013) PLEASE DO NOT CITE, QUOTE, OR DISTRIBUTE Introduction Inducing governmental organizations to do the right thing is the central problem of public administration. Especially sharp challenges arise when “the right thing” means executing not only a primary mission but also constraints on that mission (what Philip Selznick aptly labeled “precarious values”1). In a classic example, we want police to prevent and respond to crime and maintain public order, but to do so without infringing anyone’s civil rights. In the federal government, if Congress or another principal wants an executive agency to pay attention not only to its mission but also to some other constraining or conflicting value—I will call that additional value, generically, “Goodness”2—that principal has several choices. Congress can somehow impel the agency to try to seed the constraining value widely throughout its ranks—for example, by using supervision tools or incentives to get many agency employees to pay attention to 3 Goodness. Or Congress can empower some other federal organization more closely aligned 4 with Goodness to play an augmented role in the agency’s affairs. This Article addresses a third © Margo Schlanger 2013 * Professor of Law, University of Michigan. I had the privilege of serving as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties for two years beginning 2010 and as an advisor to the Secretary of Homeland Security in 2012 and some of 2013. While those experiences obviously inform the views expressed here, those views are entirely personal and not in any way attributable to DHS. Thanks to my University of Michigan colleagues for helpful comments on presentations of the idea underlying this article in both a Fawley workshop and governance lunch, to Tino Cuéllar, Liz Magill, Gillian Metzger, and Sallyanne Payton for their generous and generative conversations with me on the topic, to participants in the 2013 Law & Society Association panel in which I presented it (especially Tom Baker, the session’s discussant), and, as always, to Sam Bagenstos. All the primary documents cited below are attributed to their current locations on the Internet—but in order to preserve them for future years, I have assembled them and they are also posted at http://margoschlanger.net, in an Appendix to this Article. [Not posted yet] 1 See PHILIP SELZNICK, LEADERSHIP IN ADMINISTRATION: A SOCIOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION 119-33 (1957) 2 I capitalize the term Goodness to indicate that the word is functioning as a stand-in for something of value, not as an endorsement of any particular normative judgment. 3 See, e.g., Eric Biber, Too Many Things to Do: How to Deal with the Dysfunctions of Multiple-Goal Agencies, 33 HARV. ENVTL. L. REV. 1, 35 (2009) (describing a “range of methods [to induce an agency to pursue a secondary goal”: changing the internal incentives structure of the agency by increasing the incentives provided for less measurable or otherwise secondary goals; working directly to change the mission of the agency through political and bureaucratic pressure; imposing procedures on the agency that require it explicitly to consider ‘secondary’ goals in its decision-making process; or hiring personnel in the agency who are professionally or personally committed to advancing one or more of the ‘secondary’ goals”). 4 This approach is the subject of a rash of articles in the past several years examining the rationales and results of “overlapping” and “underlapping” jurisdiction among agencies. See, e.g., Jacob E. Gersen, Overlapping and 1 http://repository.law.umich.edu/law_econ_current/91 2 Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2322797 Schlanger: Schlanger, Offices of Goodness. DRAFT (September 9, 2013) . approach: furthering Goodness by giving it an institutional home, a subsidiary agency office I call an “Office of Goodness.” Offices of Goodness have often been created by Congress when it has sought to instill in particular agencies values that are important to the moving Members but less than central to the agencies; presidents, too, have created them for a variety of political ends. Activities by Offices of Goodness possess a logic and function worthy of academic recognition and explication; both policymakers and scholars should care about how, and when, Offices of Goodness work. But while Offices of Goodness are frequently established in federal agencies, they are all but invisible in scholarship.5 And the resulting knowledge gap is particularly problematic right now, because President Obama has just proposed a new Office of Goodness, within the National Security Agency, to increase oversight of surveillance activities.6 An Office of Goodness’s success is far from