INTRODUCTION

The U.S. president lacks most of the explicit decree authorities available to chief executives discussed elsewhere in this volume. Nonetheless, conventional wisdom identifies the presidency as the dominant branch of the U.S. national government, with broad influence over policy outcomes. Furthermore, there are theoretical reasons to expect that an American president could use decree authorities to produce an impressive effect on policy. In Chapter 1 of this volume, Carey and Shugart argue that proactive executive tools will be formidable whenever the executive also holds some substantial reactive powers (e.g., a veto power) and/or whenever legislators find it collectively difficult to take action – independent of the executive – on salient policy questions. Both of these latter conditions are conventionally accepted as prevailing in U.S. national politics.

Carey and Shugart's argument applies to executives in general, not solely to presidents. However, although the U.S. Congress often delegates foreign affairs responsibilities to the president, it rarely delegates substantive policy-making authority directly to the president in domestic policy. Instead, it typically delegates to cabinet secretaries and agency heads. I focus in this chapter on the president's role in domestic affairs. In this arena, I argue, one key to understanding the president's influence on policy implementation is his or her constitutional mandate to ensure that the laws are “faithfully executed” by government agents. This mandate could be seen as an authority by which the president interprets statutory intent for bureaucrats.