Political control of the bureaucracy in the regulation of pharmaceuticals by the United States Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission (1980--1994)

This study examines the extent of congressional and presidential control over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (an executive-branch agency) and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (an independent, regulatory commission). Congressional control and presidential control make up the two primary hypotheses. The two null hypotheses assume bureaucratic dominance. The first null hypothesis assumes that bureaus engage in self-serving regulatory activities designed to increase their own utility. The second null hypothesis assumes that bureaus regulate in accordance with their statutory purposes and their organizational missions, much in keeping with notions of a representative bureaucracy.; The study focuses on the regulation of pharmaceuticals by the two agencies from 1980 through 1994. Using multiple regression, time-series, logistic, and multinomial logistic regression, I identified some evidence of congressional control. Presidential control was less evident, although several models exhibited statistically significant coefficients for political appointees. Since the selection of appointees is a shared responsibility between Congress and the president, I find only indirect support for presidential control. Overall, however, I observed inconsistent findings across the models which do not support a definitive conclusion of congressional or presidential control. Theory, background, and the summary statistics for the measure of the dependent variable provide some support for the second null hypothesis (representative bureaucracy) in the case of the FDA. In the case of the FTC, those same factors support the notion of self-serving bureaucratic activity.