National Security, Neoinstitutionalism, and Intragovernmental Regulation:
Lessons from the Greening of the U.S. Military
With the advent in the mid-1970s of the so-called "new regulation" (e.g., affirmative
action, environmental and natural resources [ENR], occupational safety and health), the core
activities of public agencies have since fallen increasingly within the regulatory rubric of other
public agencies at all levels of our Madisonian system. Consider, for example, how agencies
within the Defense, Energy, Transportation, and Treasury departments are today pitted against
regulatory agencies in the Agriculture (the Forest Service), Interior (e.g., the Bureau of Land
Management and the National Park Service), Labor (the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration) and Commerce (e.g., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
departments, plus the Environmental Protection Agency (Lazarus 2004).
Moreover, because disputes of this kind are considered to be intramural disputes among
members of the federal "family," the unitary executive theory has been dispositive since the
Reagan administration. Because lawsuits filed by one government agency against another would
make the government both plaintiff and defendant in court, the Justice Department (resolving
legal issues) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (resolving management and
policy issues) are formally charged with resolving disputes of this kind. This frequently puts
them at odds with pro-regulatory agencies. In turn, the Council of Economic Advisers and the
Council of Environmental Quality typically weigh in on these issues, with the former joining the
more economically concerned and less pro-regulatory OMB and the latter joining the more
environmentally concerned regulatory agencies. Nor given the political, socioeconomic, and
ecological stakes involved are disputes settled within the federal government. Litigious federal
and state interest groups, federal regional offices, state regulatory and economic development
Convention