Politics and the administration 199authority is derived from statute. They report directly to Congress and their
responsibility to the president is far from clear. Any president is bound to
be concerned with the way in which these bodies regulate economic life,
but what power does the president have over them? A board, averaging five
members, who are appointed by the president for fixed terms of office, heads
each of the commissions. Thus a new president taking office will be faced
with a whole complex of agencies whose heads have been appointed by the
previous president. It may be two or three years before the process of retire-
ment makes possible the reappointment of a majority of members of each
of the commissions. Furthermore, the president does not have the power to
dismiss members of the commissions, as is the case with senior officials in
the normal executive departments. This was settled by the Supreme Court
in 1935, when it ruled in the case of Humphrey’s Executor v. US that President
Roosevelt did not have the power to dismiss a member of the Federal Trade
Commission appointed by President Hoover, except on the grounds of ‘inef-
ficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance’. The Court reiterated this view in
- However, it must be noted also that the turnover among members of
the commissions is very high, and a president will not have to wait till all the
members have completed their terms of office before their posts fall vacant.
One further limitation on the president written into the legislation regulat-
ing the composition of the commissions is the requirement that the members
should be drawn from both political parties.
Why did Congress set up agencies enjoying this degree of independence?
Undoubtedly there were a number of motives. A desire to place limits on the
increasing power of the president during the New Deal period, when some of
the major commissions were established, no doubt played a part, but there
were other and more complex reasons. In one sense the regulatory commis-
sions were the response to a new type of industrial society and to the un-
precedented role that the government was called upon to play in regulating
the economic affairs of private industry. It was felt necessary to break away
from the traditional machinery of government, with its normal division into
three parts, and to create a new instrument for this purpose, which would
be an industrial pattern of organisation to meet the needs of an industrial
society. Another reason for making these commissions independent was the
fact that they are by no means simply ‘executive’ agencies. Their regulatory
role requires that they should exercise a rule-making power; that they should
decide in a judicial fashion whether these rules were being broken in particu-
lar cases; and also that they should administer and police the rules. Thus in
lawyers’ language, in addition to their administrative functions, they exer-
cise quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial powers. These reasons reinforced the
point of view of those who believed that it was time administration was taken
out of politics and recognised as a distinct technique, which could be objec-
tively and efficiently applied to the solution of largely technical problems.
However, the hope that agencies whose decisions could make fortunes for
some and deny them to others, and that might affect the whole economic