On many dimensions, the administrative state is at the nadir of its power. The Supreme Court has tightened administrative law controls on agency power, and the Trump Administration has stormed the bureaucracy in an unprecedented blitz designed to kneecap agency capacity and independence. For better or worse, many agencies and their civil servants are being sidelined as meaningful actors in the administration of government. Yet this familiar account doesn’t tell the entire story. At the same time that agencies are being stripped of the power to implement law—what this Article calls “legal administration”— they are steadily accumulating extensive and largely unchecked powers to advance controversial policy goals through strategic uses of information and communication what this Article calls “communicative administration.”

These powers, though not new, are becoming more potent: Amplified by modern communication technologies and legally unencumbered, they are emerging as attractive policymaking tools for partisan overseers of the administrative state. Against this backdrop, communicative administration is poised to become a stronger focal point for both real-world administrative action and significant contestation over administrative power. Already, the last two presidential administrations have aggressively used communicative administration to pursue policy goals that might exceed the scope of agencies’ power in the more traditional domain of legal administration—for instance, using social media to fight pandemic misinformation or running nationally televised commercials to encourage self-deportation. Responding to these strategies, courts have begun to improvise in the administrative law vacuum that surrounds communicative administration, seeking to curtail through legal means what used to be constrained by informal norms.

These developments have the potential to change not only the degree of power wielded by the administrative state, but also the very nature of that power. This Article seeks to draw greater scholarly attention to these risks by systematically charting the domain of communicative administration and showing how it eludes traditional administrative law constraints, even as it stands to become more consequential and contested in a highly polarized information society. The Article then ventures preliminary answers as to how communicative administration might be both harnessed to achieve goals that are no longer attainable through legal administration and regulated so as to prevent populist authoritarian co-optation. At its best, communicative administration could be part of a resurgent administrative democracy in a time of informational and democratic crisis; at its worst, it could be an instrument of democratic backsliding. Prevailing trends favoring executive power over administrative agencies make the latter far more likely, but the present moment is an inflection point, and either future remains possible. Which future prevails will be determined, in part, by how administrative law responds to the rise of communicative administration.

* Professor of Law, Texas A&M University School of Law. This Article benefited from presentation and feedback at the New Administrative Law Scholarship Roundtable at the University of Michigan Law School, the ABA Administrative Law Spring Academic Workshop, the University of Oklahoma School of Law Faculty Colloquium, and the Texas A&M University School of Law Public Law Workshop. I am grateful to Nick Bagley, Nicholas Bednar, Emily Bremer, Elena Chachko, Nathan Cortez, Katherine Mims Crocker, Haiyun Damon-Feng, Dan Deacon, Anuj Desai, Laura Dolbow, Bridget Fahey, Susan Fortney, Jeremy Graboyes, Andrew Hammond, Nick Handler, Chris Havasy, Monica Haymond, Jeff Lubbers, Alex Mechanick, Nina Mendelson, Gillian Metzger, Joel Michaels, Melissa Mortazavi, Julian Davis Mortenson, Jennifer Nou, Alex Nunn, Chris Odinet, Nick Parrillo, Todd Phillips, Con Reynolds, Rachel Rothschild, Bill Sage, Matthew Sanders, Gabe Scheffler, Jennifer Selin, Bijal Shah, Jed Shugerman, Wendy Wagner, Chris Walker, and David Zaring for helpful guidance and conversations. Thanks also to Kirsten Worden and Michael Cooper, Texas A&M J.D. Class of 2025, for excellent research assistance, and to the entire editorial staff at the Stanford Law Review for their helpful suggestions and careful attention to the manuscript.