8.4: Policymakers

People love to debate issues in the United States. A quick Google search will return a plethora of topics that people can argue over. When it comes to policy making, there are two primary groups: policy advocates and policy analysts.

Policy Advocates

Take a minute to think of a policy change you believe would improve some conditions in the United States. Now ask yourself this: “Why do I want to change this policy?” Are you motivated by a desire for justice? Do you feel the policy change would improve your life or that of members of your community? Is your sense of morality motivating you to change the status quo? Would your profession be helped? Do you feel that changing the policy might raise your status?

Most people have some policy position or issue they would like to see altered. Most people do little more than vote or occasionally contribute to a political campaign. A few people become policy advocates by actively working to propose or maintain a public policy.

Figure 1. In 2010, members of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) demonstrate against a local zoo. As policy advocates, PETA’s members often publicize their position on how animals should be treated.

Policy advocates hold a normative position on an issue, that is, they have a conviction about what should or ought to be done. In their view, the best public policy accomplishes a specific goal or outcome. Facts, evidence, and analysis are important tools for convincing policymakers or the general public of the benefits of their proposals. Private citizens often find themselves in advocacy positions, particularly if they are required to take on leadership roles in their private lives or in their organizations. The most effective advocates are usually hired professionals who form lobbying groups or think tanks to promote their agenda.

Policy Analysts

Rather than starting with what ought to happen and seeking ways to make it so, policy analysts try to identify all the possible choices available to a decision maker and then gauge their impacts if implemented. In other words, the goal of the analyst is to make sure decision makers are fully informed about the implications of the decisions they do make.

Understanding the financial and other costs and benefits of policy choices requires analysts to make strategic guesses about how the public and governmental actors will respond. For example, when policymakers are considering changes to health care policy, one very important question is how many people will participate. If very few people had chosen to take advantage of the new health care plans available under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace, it would have been significantly cheaper than advocates proposed, but it also would have failed to accomplish the key goal of increasing the number of insured. If all states had chosen to create their own marketplaces, the cost and complexity of ACA’s implementation would have been greatly reduced.

Because advocates have an incentive to understate costs and overstate benefits, policy analysis tends to be a highly politicized aspect of government. Most businesses or trade organizations employ their own policy-analysis wings to help them understand proposed changes or even offer some of their own. Some of these try to be as impartial as possible. Most groups have a known bias toward policy advocacy. The Cato Institute is well known and highly respected policy analysis group that both liberal and conservative politicians have turned to when considering policy options. But the Cato Institute has a known libertarian bias; most of the problems it selects for analysis have the potential for private sector solutions. This means its analysts tend to include the rosiest assumptions of economic growth when considering tax cuts and overestimate the costs of public sector proposals.

Government Agencies

The RAND Corporation has conducted objective policy analysis for corporate, nonprofit, and government clients since the mid-twentieth century. What are some of the policy areas it has explored?

Both Congress and the president have tried to reduce the bias in policy analysis by creating their own theoretically nonpartisan policy branches. Authorized in the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was formally created in 1975 as a way of increasing Congress’s independence from the executive branch. The CBO is responsible for scoring the spending or revenue impact of all proposed legislation to assess its net effect on the budget. In recent years, it has been the CBO’s responsibility to provide Congress with guidance on how to best balance the budget. The formulas that the CBO uses in scoring the budget have become an important part of the policy debate, even as the group has tried to maintain its nonpartisan nature.

Figure 3. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is responsible for studying the impact of all proposed legislation to assess its net effect on the budget and tracking federal debt. For example, this 2010 CBO chart shows federal debt held by the public as a percentage of gross domestic product from 1790 through 2010 and projected to 2035. NOTE: These predictions occurred before the Covid-19 Pandemic. How do you think the graph might have changed?

In the executive branch, each individual department and agency is technically responsible for its own policy analysis. It's assumed that experts in the Federal Communications Commission or the Federal Elections Commission are best equipped to evaluate the impact of various proposals within their policy domain. Law requires that most regulatory changes made by the federal government also include the opportunity for public input so the government can both gauge public opinion and seek outside perspectives.

Executive branch agencies are usually also charged with considering the economic impact of regulatory action, although some agencies have been better at this than others. Critics have frequently singled out the EPA and OSHA for failing to adequately consider the impact of new rules on business. Within the White House itself, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was created to “serve the President of the United States in implementing his [or her] vision” of policy. Policy analysis is important to the OMB’s function, but as you can imagine, it frequently compromises its objectivity during policy formulation.

THE POLICY PROCESS

Given the sheer number of issues already processed by the government, it is typically quite difficult to move a new policy all the way through the policy process. To do required four sequential stages:

• agenda setting consists of two parts:
  • problem identification identifies the issues that merit discussion. Not all issues make it onto the governmental agenda because there is only so much attention that government can pay. Thus, it's important to frame the issue in a compelling way that raises a persuasive dimension or critical need.
  • alternative specification considers solutions to fix the difficulty raised in problem identification. For example, government officials may agree that the increase in childhood obesity presents a societal problem worthy of government attention.
• policy enactment is when the elected branches of government typically consider one specific solution to a problem and decide whether to pass it. This stage is the most visible one and usually garners the most press coverage. And yet it is somewhat anticlimatic. By the time a specific policy proposal (a solution) comes out of agenda setting for a yes/no vote, it can be something of a foregone conclusion that it will pass.
• policy implementation can occur in one of two ways
  • top-down implementation, the federal government dictates the specifics of the policy, and each state implements it the same exact way
  • bottom-up implementation, the federal government allows local areas some flexibility to meet their specific challenges and needs.
• evaluation should be tied directly to the policy’s desired outcomes. This step asks “How well did this policy do what we designed it to do?”

Think About It

• In the implementation phase of the policy process, is it better to use a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach on Federal policies? Why?

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