The United States Congress, Responsiveness, and Administrative Agency Performance

For federal agencies to be democratically accountable, they must effectively implement federal law and regulation and respond to instructions from elected officials. There is substantial variation across the United States government in both the quality of program management and responsiveness to elected officials. In this paper we evaluate competing explanations for U.S. agency performance on these dimensions, focusing on the case of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a federal law that allows private citizens to request documents from any U.S. government agency. Working with the staff of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, we obtained two new unique measures of U.S. agency performance. In January 2011 the chair of the Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) sent 107 agencies identical requests for information about their FOIA processes. Our first measure uses committee records of the time it took agencies to respond to these identical requests and the committee’s evaluation of the quality of the FOIA process inside each agency. In May 2011 we requested through FOIA copies of all agency correspondence with Rep. Issa, allowing us to compare the information actually provided to the Chairman by the agencies with the information we received through FOIA. This provides a second means of evaluating the quality of the FOIA process inside these agencies.