Policy Implementation

Concisely defined, policy implementation is what occurs after a legislature has acted and a bill becomes law. Legislatures typically are unable to consider all that must be undertaken when they envisage a program or initiative and so rely on implementers (or administrators) to flesh out the details once a statute has been enacted. Those particulars are often heavily freighted with political portent or carry with them far-ranging responsibility to develop new technologies, invent or refine approaches to problems, or mediate important conflicts. For example, when the National Environmental Policy Act was created in 1970, it was expected to work with industry to develop technologies to limit and hopefully to remediate air and water pollution. But there was no consensus in industry or among experts, as it began its task, concerning which technologies to employ or whether certain technologies out of those available were more effective than others. Similarly, the Department of Health and Human Services was charged by law (Section 504 of The Rehabilitation Act of 1973) with securing access to public transportation for the wheelchair bound (among other things)—a process that took some twenty years, cost millions of dollars in litigation-related fees, and involved multiple federal agencies, state and local governments, and the nation's courts as these entities wrangled over what constituted a most practicable technology and what manner of cost was reasonable to impose for this purpose. These examples illustrate the importance of this phase of the policy process and suggest the centrality of administrators to policy outcomes. Plainly put, [Page 693]actual outcomes for citizens are often determined during program implementation.

Policy implementation is indeed a critical phase of the nation's public policy process and one that is necessarily political as administrators use their discretion to make important choices that often have significant consequences for those receiving services or who are otherwise affected by public programs. Implementation decisionmakers work to make statutory pronouncements real for the populations affected. If a program for the shut-in poor is created, for example, that choice demands that the implementing agency take necessary steps to locate targeted individuals in affected jurisdictions, decide how to contact them—whether to send a letter to potential participants, at what grade level to write that note, whether the message should be sent only in English or in other languages—and so on. Alternately, perhaps it would be more effective to send Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to knock on the doors of those potentially eligible to provide them information about the new program? These implementer choices make the difference in who is served and how they are assisted. Choices that affect service quality, equity, and effectiveness are the everyday stuff of policy implementation. Importantly, these decisions are typically made with only general guidance from lawmakers who often cannot foresee important program concerns or who otherwise wish to be absolved of responsibility for addressing them. Their nearly unavoidable exercise of discretion makes administrators ready targets for lawmakers that often blame implementers for policy outcomes, even when it is arguable that poor policy design or other factors well within the purview of the legislators were the proximate cause of a lessthan-ideal outcome. Hurricane Katrina may provide an example, as many in Congress moved to blame the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as well as state and local authorities for the ineffective response to the disaster, even as some experts are contending that legislative decisions not to provide the necessary funds for levee upkeep and repair allowed the breaching to occur in the first place. Whatever the appropriate explanation or combination of explanations in this instance, the broader point is that implementation agents operate in a regime structure of separated powers and often find themselves held responsible for all dimensions of policy outcomes regardless of whether they could reasonably have been expected to control those results. Because they work for three different political masters (congressional, executive, and judicial), implementers have little formal recourse to complain about this state of affairs. Their place, in short, within our regime framework is paradoxical—administrators are critical, but their efforts are unlikely often to be rewarded, much less revered.

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