Replication Data for: Presidential Investment in the Administrative State

Given the U.S. president’s authority over the administrative state, one may expect that the chief executive invests great effort to build capacity within agencies to implement the tasks Congress and the president have assigned to them. The empirical data shows that this not the case. In this paper we explain how presidents strategically invest in administrative capacity, noting that presidents have few incentives to invest effort in capacity building in most agencies. We test our account with two analyses using new observational and survey data. First, we examine the time it took for the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations to nominate individuals to appointed positions. We find that presidents prioritize appointments to policy positions over management positions and that nominations occur sooner in agencies that implement presidential priorities. Second, we examine the responses of federal executives to the 2020 Survey on the Future of Government Service to see whether perceptions of presidential investment in administrative capacity match those anticipated by our predictions. We find that federal executives perceive higher levels of investment when the agency is a priority of the president and when the agency shares the president’s ideological leanings. We conclude by drawing out implications for our understanding of the modern presidency, particularly presidential reputation, and government performance.