UC San Diego

Federal regulations exist to universally protect the public interest, including civil rights, public health, and the environment, sometimes explicitly at the expense of narrow interests. Yet federal officials often demonstrate leniency when it comes to enforcing these regulations. What prompts the federal government to selectively reverse course and relax federal rules at the expense of the public good? This dissertation examines the political incentives driving the timing and allocation of regulatory leniency. I argue the emergence and use of regulatory leniency in the executive branch is a response to the likelihood of policy reform in Congress. Importantly, my theory demonstrates that both presidents who seek to reform existing policies and presidents who seek to preserve existing policies are incentivized under different circumstances to use leniency to achieve their policy goals. I test my theory by examining strategic decisions in revision and implementation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) between 1973 and 2017. I trace parameters of interest through interviews with policy experts and close examination of party platforms, congressional hearing transcripts, and political reporting, as a preliminary test. I then construct a dataset of four leniency mechanisms available to the executive under the ESA and predict their patterns of use. I find that presidents who oppose a policy are more likely to use leniency to relax the policy in periods of congressional gridlock, and tend to rely on narrower exemptions and stalling tactics. I find that the narrower forms of exemption follow a pattern of presidential partisan particularism. Presidents who support a policy do not stall implementation; however, they issue more policy exemptions (both narrow and broad) when the policy is threatened with revision in Congress. These results hold when controlling for administrative capacity, economic variables, and time trends.