Search

Coastal and ocean management in the United States is a complex issue requiring an equally complex management policy. Federal policy has historically been carried out in a siloed (sector-by-sector) fashion causing inefficient and bureaucratic management by federal agencies. The Obama administration took a novel approach to coastal and ocean management by signing an executive order that brought together federal agencies and empowered regional stakeholders, creating a first of its kind comprehensive National Ocean Policy. In 2018, former President Donald Trump rescinded the Obamaera policy and enacted his own version of National Ocean Policy that shifted authority to the states and focused on the economic potential of American waters. This research addresses a significant challenge in federal management of a complex natural resource. Here we identify common management strategies between different administrations to provide insights for future attempts at National Ocean Policy. We collect policy documents, press releases, and congressional testimony from high-level stakeholders and identified the most common themes over a 12-year period from 2009-2021. We find three common themes between the administrations even though their policies varied in strategy and scope: 1) the importance of a strong and enduring marine economy, 2) creating a strategic and efficient ocean policy, and 3) devolving authority from the federal government to state and regional decision-makers. We argue that coastal and ocean management via executive order is too easily rescinded to have a lasting impact. These novel findings highlight potential strategies for bipartisan cooperation in future attempts at National Ocean Policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political leaders construct meanings for current events in support of their existing policy goals, but the constructed meanings do not change when policy goals change. Consequently, the established narrative of the past becomes part of the policymaking terrain, justifying existing policies and creating criteria for policy success. It must be navigated by leaders seeking to reach their policy objectives. References made by U.S. and Israeli political leaders to the event known as "9/11" from 2002 through 2019 reveal how they renegotiated its meaning as their policy goals evolved. Policy goals at the time of the event shaped the meanings made of the event. As policy goals changed, existing meanings could not be discarded or reshaped at will, nor could 9/11 simply be forgotten. Instead, leaders navigated and amended the inescapable public memory of 9/11 to support varying policy goals over a 20-year time span. For Israel, 9/11 made a chronic problem an international cause célèbre, offering potential to generate international response to a commonly marginalized threat, a narrative prime ministers sought to adapt as their policy goals changed. In the U.S. the George W. Bush Administration's narrative of 9/11 promoted and sustained the administration's policies and goals, making it difficult for Barack Obama's administration to change course unless it could tell a different story. Both cases demonstrate that arguments made for or against policies are contingent upon how the past is narrated. Collective remembrance can affect the contours of public policy, for the remembered past constitutes the terrain of policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this manuscript, we seek to understand how linguistic devices can be used to critique the moral and political frameworks surrounding the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Specifically, we focus on two documents that reflect policy responses to the UNDRIP: (1) a press release from 13 September 2007 outlining the United States Government's position in voting against the adoption of the UNDRIP, and (2) President Obama's speech from 16 December 2010 about the reversal of said position. Through the use of TribalCrit to interpret our results, implications of our analyses point to the extent to which power is exercised within an announced position endorsing UNDRIP as an implicit pronouncement of state-centered goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American governance in the twenty-first century continues down a path of enhanced coercion and direction from the federal government. Emergency management policy is no different from any other policy field in this aspect, especially in the time following the September 11 attacks. Throughout the Obama administration, the federal government continued these policies and created additional mandates that required local compliance with federal policy demands. Failure to do so would put grant funding at risk in a field where budgets are typically stretched to the limit. However, an earlier study by Hildebrand (J Homeland Secur Emerg Manag 12(2):273–298, 2015) showed that this coercive threat had no statistical significance in predicting the reported implementation behaviors of local emergency management officials during the George W. Bush administration. This study seeks to determine if attitudes of local emergency managers changed during the Obama administration, and if the potential impacts from coercion had any predictive effect upon the local agencies decision to implement policy demands from the National Response Framework (NRF), National Incident Management System (NIMS), and Incident Command System (ICS). The findings once again show that coercive threats (the potential loss of grant funding) play little-to-no role in the actions and attitudes of local emergency management professionals when reporting compliance with federal policy demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost two centuries distance from John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith's works, the Homo economicus concept seems to have fewer and fewer supporters. Designing economic policies based on the idea of an entirely rational individual who has access to all the relevant information and takes decisions strictly following his interest is no more realistic. Several politicians, such as Barack Obama and David Cameron, have used behavioural insides to draw public policies. In this context, this paper has as a main objective to realise a SWOT analysis of nudge-based policies, also trying to answer the next questions: Are they effective? Are they ethical? Are there any limitations in applying nudging in public policies to overcome the main downsides? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Obama administration has stated its intention to avoid a new Cold War, but it has also demonstrated little interest in addressing the core issue in the dispute, namely the regional order in post-Soviet Europe and Eurasia. This "middle way" policy has failed. In order to head off a new Cold War, the United States should lead the West in a new approach that eases competition over countries like Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article delves into the persistent continuity in U.S. counterterrorism policy post-9/11, drawing parallels to a comedic sketch's repetitive dinner routine. It examines the strategies of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, highlighting their shared commitment to externalizing the terrorism threat through military actions, drone strikes, Guantanamo detentions, and surveillance, attributing this consistency to American strategic culture.

The Obama administration has approved an upgrade to the B61 nuclear bomb that will, through use of a new tail kit assembly, become a guided standoff nuclear bomb. If the upgrade—the 12th modification of the original B61 design—is pursued as planned, the US Air Force will obtain the low-yield, precision-guided nuclear weapon it first sought in the 1990s, despite concerns that it could increase the likelihood of use. The weapon’s overall price tag is expected to exceed $10 billion, with each B61-12 estimated to cost more than the value of its weight in gold. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Changes in Hungary's foreign policy over the last decade, including its relations with the great powers, have become the subject of increased interest for researchers in the field of international relations. These changes have been examined mainly in the context of constitutional and institutional measures udermining liberal democracy taken in Hungary after 2010 and its efforts to diversify external economic and political relations. Hungary - United States relations have been marked by different approaches of the administration of Barack Obama and Donald Trump to the Hungarian government's policy. Differences of these two periods of Hungarian-American relations were examined in the article. Analyses showed that the different values and strategic priorities in the foreign policy of both presidents are especially significant. A noticeable cooling of bilateral relations during the administration of Barack Obama was the result of the implementation of the illiberal concept in the Hungarian political system. The preference for nationalism and power over democracy in Donald Trump's policy has created the preconditions for a turnaround in Hungarian-US relations. Their further development may be complicated by Hungary's maneuvering between the US and its competitors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on the satisficing and attribution theories to propose a model of presidential approval where issue priorities moderate the association between presidents' policy performance evaluations and overall approval. The data include aggregate time‐series and cross‐sectional individual‐level data of presidential approval, presidential performance evaluations, and issue priorities from Reagan to Obama. The results demonstrate that people give more weight to the issues they prioritize, and therefore their evaluation of the president's performance on those issues matters more in their overall assessment of the president. The impact of issue priorities on approval varies by topic but is not further moderated by party affiliation. The results advance our understanding of the individual determinants of presidential approval and the role that issue priorities play in public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Last summer, 11 Harvard graduate students and postdocs went to France to investigate Areva's spent fuel reprocessing. On the trip, they debated whether the United States should reprocess as well. What resulted was the typical split that has followed this debate for decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the Obama Administration, agencies issued guidance concerning sexual assault and harassment on college campuses, transgender rights, the use of arrest and conviction records in employment decisions, and deferral of deportation proceedings against undocumented immigrants. These actions have been either set aside by circuit courts or rescinded under the Trump Administration, in part on the grounds that they were issued without notice-and-comment rulemaking. Nonetheless, courts have blocked the Trump Administration's rescission of the deferred- action program because the government failed to consider the "serious reliance interests" the program had generated. This Article examines the legal validity and effect of these recent administrative actions concerning civil rights and social inclusion. In doing so, it addresses some of the most difficult and disputed questions in administrative law: what is the appropriate scope of the "guidance exemption" from notice-and-comment rulemaking and what kinds of legal effects can guidance generate? Drawing on the philosophy of law, the Article argues that guidance can provide a privileged reason for agency action but cannot categorically mandate or prohibit any course of public or private conduct. Such nonbinding action can nonetheless generate legally cognizable interests when individuals and institutions rely on the guidance to make plans and investments, or to see their status or the harms they suffer recognized. These reliance interests must be taken into account if the policy is to be rescinded. This argument has concrete consequences for the staying power of the policies federal agencies put in place during the Obama Administration. More broadly, it sheds light on problems of internal administrative procedure and judicial review of administrative action, as well as fundamental issues in jurisprudence concerning "the force and effect of law." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • It is claimed that CO 2 emissions and economic growth are decoupled in the US. • A cap-and-trade policy has been implemented to reduce CO 2 emissions in California. • We find annual changes in emissions strongly correlated with economic growth. • CO 2 emissions in California and other states do not suggest any effect of the policy. • We find no evidence supporting the claim of decoupling. Abstract Since the 1990s, advocates of policy to prevent catastrophic climate change have been divided over the appropriate economic instruments to curb CO 2 emissions—carbon taxes or schemes of emission trading. Barack Obama claimed that policies implemented during his presidency set in motion irreversible trends toward a clean-energy economy, with the years 2008–2015 given as evidence of decoupling between CO 2 emissions and economic growth. This is despite California being the only state in the USA that has implemented a specific policy to curb emissions, a cap-and-trade scheme in place since 2013. To assess Obama's claims and the effectiveness of policies to reduce CO 2 emissions, we analyze national and state-level data from the USA over the period 1990–2015. We find: (a) annual changes in emissions strongly correlated with the growth conditions of the economy; (b) no evidence for decoupling; and (c) a trajectory of CO 2 emissions in California which does not at all support the claim that the cap-and-trade system implemented there has reduced CO 2 emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President Obama's commitment to a creedal narrative of American exceptionalism and his understanding of the Third World as a space of ontological deficit together made for a presidency that could neither mitigate the structural racism of the United States nor deflect a racist foreign policy premised on an unending war against terror. By examining the murders of two American teenagers – Trayvon Martin and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki – this essay argues that the very self-fashioning narratives that propelled Obama to the presidency of the United States rendered him incapable of effecting any substantive changes in the racism than animates its domestic and foreign policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a growing discussion in recent years about rising inequality in the U.S. Yet, this discourse, in focusing on the fortunes of the top 1%, distracted attention from the design of policy initiatives aimed at improving socio-economic conditions for the poor. This paper examines the development of anti-poverty politics and policy in the US during the Obama era. It analyses how effective the strategies and programmes adopted were and asks how they fit with models of policy change. The paper illustrates that the Obama administration did adopt an array of anti-poverty measures in the stimulus bill, but these built on existing programmes rather than create new ones and much of the effort was stymied by institutional obstacles. The expansion of the Medicaid program, which was part of the ACA, was also muted by institutional opposition, but it was a more path breaking reform than is often appreciated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of congressional polarization has led presidents to seek alternative ways to pursue their agendas through staffing. I argue presidents use excepted appointments, which are excepted both from advice and consent and competitive hiring processes, when ideological conflict within the Senate is high. I also argue that Schedule C appointments specifically are concentrated in agencies ideologically similar to the president due to their advisory nature. I find preliminary support for these hypotheses using Office of Personnel Management data on Schedule C appointees from 1998 to 2013. In sum, this study shows that excepted appointments are an important yet understudied tool in the president's administrative toolbox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses American transgender policy in the wake of a U.S. federal judge's determination that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Transgender Mandate dealing with sex-reassignment procedures is unlawful, and it mentions religious liberty violations and the regulation of health insurance under the nation's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments of 1972 and American President Barack Obama's administration are examined.

The policy debate over embryonic stem cell (ESC) research in the United States mainly focuses on the extent to which the government ought to provide resources for that research. This article addresses the strategic use of network positions to mobilize an effective coordination system for lifting the moratorium on funding of ESC under the Obama administration since March 2009. By identifying patterns of interactions between members in a network of embedded ties, we can explore the major actors who play the role of brokers or entrepreneurs in stem cell research funding policy under the Obama administration. For that, this article utilizes social network analysis and the G&F brokerage roles framework to identify key brokers in facilitating coordination among various members engaged in funding human stem cell research in the governance network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses American bioethics, scientific advancement, and public policy conflicts in relation to various revisions to the Common Rule regulations that comprise the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects. Changes in human subjects research over the years are addressed, along with the Common Rule-related work of former U.S. President Barack Obama's Administration and the publication of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in 2015.

We examine attitudes of the pubic toward delegation to presidential commissions. In four survey experiments across a range of contexts, we compare the public response to the creation of a commission to that of a direct presidential action. We find that there is no significant difference in the approval garnered for taking action alone or delegating the decision to a presidential commission. This is true whether this is at the policy formulation stage or implementation stage. Additionally, we do not find that policies formed by commissions are seen as any more effective than those policies formed by the president alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing frequency, U.S. presidents have orchestrated relations between federal and state governments. A defining feature of this 'executive federalism' is a pragmatic willingness to both borrow from and reconstitute very different types of past federalisms. A case in point is President Barack Obama's Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, which sought to stimulate the adoption of specific education reforms in state governments around the country through a series of highly prescriptive but entirely voluntary policy competitions. This paper evaluates the results of such efforts. To do so, it draws on four original data sets: a nationally representative survey of state legislators, an analysis of State of the State speeches, another of state applications to the competitions themselves, and finally, an inventory of state policymaking trends in a range of education policies that were awarded under the competition. This paper then relies upon a variety of identification strategies to gauge the influence of RttT on the nation's education policy landscape. Taken as a whole the evidence suggests that RttT, through both direct and indirect means, augmented the production of state policies that were central components of the president's education agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's insights regarding the efforts of the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama to improve the teacher evaluation policies in the country. Topics discussed include the importance of teacher quality in in-school factor that affects growth in student achievement, the investments of the administration in educator evaluation and compensation through the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) program, and the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

The article discusses topics such as executive orders by U.S. president Barack Obama on immigration and mentions topics such as deportation of immigrants from the country, undocumented immigrants and immigration integration in San Jose, California. Other topics which includes committees set up in the city for civic engagement, economic opportunity and infrastructure development for refugee communities and immigrants are also discussed. In addition, naturalization and skill development are also mentioned.

Open government initiatives, which include not only transparency but also participation and collaboration policies, have become a major administrative reform. As such, these initiatives are gaining cohesiveness in literature. President Obama supported open government through a range of policies including the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multinational initiative. The OGP requires member organizations to develop open government national action plans, which are used as the basis for my analysis. To frame this paper, I use and expand upon David Heald’s directions and varieties of transparency framework. A content analysis of the 62 commitments in the US Second Open Government National Action Plan was conducted. The analysis provides two findings of note: First, the traditional view of transparency was indeed the most prevalent in the policies proposed. In that respect, not much has changed, even with the OGP’s emphasis on a range moof approaches. Second, openness among and between agencies played a larger than expected role. While the OGP pushed an array of administrative reforms, the initiative had limited impact on the type of policies that were proposed and enacted. In sum, the OGP is an administrative reform that was launched with great fanfare, but limited influence in the US context. More research needs to be conducted to determine is the “open government reform” movement as a whole suffers from such problems in implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's views on the commitment of U.S. President-elect Donald J. Trump to reform the immigration laws. Particular focus of the law reform was given on the construction of a big wall along the southern Mexican border and his declaration of war against Mexican immigrants, whom he identified as rapists and criminals. The author mentions Trump's documented history of racism against African Americans. Also discussed is the cancellation of an executive order signed by former U.S. President Barack Obama including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and a pledge to deport non-U.S. citizen criminals.