Multimember commissions are a central feature of the modern administrative state. Yet a growing number have lost their legal authority to function—not through statutory repeal or defunding, but because they lack a quorum. In many cases, these quorum losses stem from the President’s assertion of a broad removal power, which causes vacancies in the commission’s…
This Article recovers the largely overlooked legal and administrative history of the federal loyalty program and argues that it played a formative role in the development of modern civil service protections and administrative law. During the McCarthy era, the United States Civil Service Commission (CSC), under pressure from Congress, implemented a sweeping loyalty program aimed…
With few exceptions, the federal courts of appeals have jurisdiction over—and only over—“final decisions” of the district courts. Yet there is a little-known but highly consequential rule, known as the “administrative remand rule,” that an order remanding an administrative agency’s decision under the Administrative Procedure Act is final only as to the agency. That is,…
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…
Civil rights enforcement is often imagined as the work of lawyers in court. But over the course of the twentieth century, the administrative state quietly emerged as one of the most significant arenas for civil rights adjudication. In 2023 alone, individuals filed more civil-rights-related complaints with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Equal…
The number of federal departments and agencies focused on countering threats to the United States, protecting soldiers and civilians, strengthening the country’s physical and digital infrastructure, and defending the political and constitutional structure from (primarily foreign) attack dwarfs the number in existence when Congress introduced the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). That statute sought to prevent…
This Essay’s purpose is to show how Trump v. CASA should be read—and how it emphatically should not be read. While CASA rejected one pathway to universal injunctive relief on statutory grounds, the decision simultaneously left intact a number of alternative routes to broad relief, including complete-relief injunctions, universal remedies under the Administrative Procedure Act…
When a court reviews an agency’s regulation and finds it to be partially invalid, the court must determine the proper remedy. Should the court vacate the entire regulation, issue a remand to the agency without vacatur, or sever the offending portion and allow the lawful remainder to take effect? The issue of regulatory severability is…
