From: RegBlog | Penn Program on Regulation
We rely on agencies to increase air quality and mitigate climate change, protect public health and safety, and safeguard the integrity of financial markets. Nearly a century ago Max Weber cogently observed that the modern nation-state depends on bureaucracy—or, in modern parlance, on administrative agencies. He would not have been surprised to see how, even as self-driving cars navigate the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Mountain View, California, agencies staffed by bureaucrats and overseen by administrators have remained the essential organizational technology of the administrative state. Whether those agency administrators exercise sufficient independent judgment as individuals to warrant the integrity and accountability of a decision has, in turn, been the subject of some classic administrative law cases.
But technological change is creating new dilemmas and opportunities for the administrative state. Agencies today can rely on sophisticated computer programs—programs that agencies could use to make or support decisions, and could therefore assume an increasingly prominent role in the regulatory process. The smartphones that so many Americans carry around in their pockets are far more powerful––and an order of magnitude cheaper––than the vast computers scientists and the military used a generation ago. In the coming years, computing power and storage will almost certainly become even cheaper, surveillance more pervasive, software architecture more flexible, and the limitations of human decision-makers will become more salient.
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