Federal agencies are deeply involved in both the foreground and shadows of legislative drafting. In the foreground, agencies draft the substantive legislation the Administration desires to submit to Congress. In the shadows, agencies provide confidential “technical drafting assistance” on legislation that originates with congressional staffers. This technical drafting assistance provides Congress with agency expertise on the subject matter, which helps Congress avoid considering legislation that would unnecessarily disrupt the current statutory scheme. It also allows the agency to play an active—yet opaque—role in drafting legislation from the very early stages. In fact, the empirical findings presented in this Article, based on extensive interviews and surveys at some twenty federal agencies, suggest that agencies provide technical drafting assistance on the vast majority of proposed legislation that directly affects them and on most legislation that gets enacted.
The underexplored yet widespread practice of legislating in the shadows has important implications for administrative law theory and doctrine, as well as the conventional principal–agent bureaucratic model. On one hand, this phenomenon perhaps supports the growing scholarly call that agencies should be allowed to engage in more purposivist interpretation (than their judicial counterparts) because of their expertise in legislative history and purpose as well as their role in statutory drafting. On the other, this phenomenon may cast some doubt on the foundations for judicial deference to agency statutory interpretations. Agencies are usually intimately involved in drafting legislation that ultimately delegates—to themselves—the authority to interpret that very legislation. In other words, many of the criticisms of agency self‐delegation raised against Auer deference could apply with some force to Chevron deference as well. At the very least, scholars should consider more closely the administrative state’s role in drafting legislation—especially drafting legislation in the shadows—when evaluating the level of deference courts should give to agency statutory interpretations. Such reconsideration is particularly warranted given the lack of transparency implicated by legislating in the shadows.