Iron Triangles

The term iron triangle has been used both by scholars and by muckraking popular writers to refer to the alignment of interests and actions among three key actors in public policy making in the United States: regulated industry or other special interests, the oversight committees in the legislature, and the regulatory agency or other bureaucracy. The typical outcome of this alignment is the production of both specific regulatory decisions and regulatory policies, including the regulations themselves, that tend to protect and promote the regulated industry. For example, in recent years, critics of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have argued that pharmaceutical companies, with the support of Congress, have had undue influence in the decisions of the FDA, resulting in the marketing of drugs whose sometimes dangerous side effects have not been tracked by the FDA or reported in a timely way by the companies.

Sometimes the role of the regulatory agency is played by a public bureaucracy that has the ability to make decisions or allocate resources that are important to the industry. For example, the so-called militaryindustrial complex may be seen as an iron triangle among oversight committees in Congress, the Defense Department or particular branches of the military, and components of the defense industry. The term militaryindustrial complex was introduced in President Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People on January 17, 1961. The speech was written by the political scientist Malcolm [Page 1197]Moos. In the speech, Eisenhower warned that “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Concern over the ill effects of the undue influence of private power was not new at the time of Eisenhower's speech. This theme was common, for example, in Populist complaints in the 19th century, New Deal era criticisms of business, and the work of critical economists and political scientists of the mid-20th century such as Horace Gray and Grant McConnell. Political scientists of that era, such as Merle Fainsod, Samuel Huntington, Marver Bernstein, and, later, scholars such as Edwin Epstein, began to develop models linking the efforts of interest groups with the institutional structures in government that they sought to influence.

Bernstein's life cycle model is perhaps the best known. In it he argued that a regulatory agency follows a path of maturation, from aggressive regulation supported by the activist interest groups instrumental in the agency's creation as a response to a social or economic problem, to an old age in which those groups no longer provide active support and are replaced by the regulated industry. Over time, via repeated interactions in which the agency adjusts to the positive and negative pressures coming from the industry, the industry “captures” the regulatory process. Congress either gives little attention to the agency or provides oversight that responds to the industry's interests.