ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how the independent regulatory commissions not only regained autonomy from the president but also became fully institutionalized during the New Deal. The 1926 Supreme Court decision allowing presidents to fire any commissioner at will made them tolerant of the now-nonindependent commissions, and this ironically led to the addition of powerful commissions such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and National Labor Relations Board. But the Court reinstated the commissions’ autonomy with the 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Furious with the ruling, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instructed the Brownlow Committee he appointed in 1936 to devise an executive reorganization plan including a scheme to abolish independent commissions. The Committee and its staff were unable to justify the reorganization, however, as any such reform would come at the cost of procedural fairness in administrative policy making. While Roosevelt insisted that the Committee go forward with a plan to absorb the commissions into executive departments, the administration conceded in the face of strong opposition. The failure to abolish commissions by the popular president and the authorities in public administration confirmed that the independent regulatory commissions were now a permanent fixture in the US government.
