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The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal. By Joanna L. Grisinger. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 324 pp. $88.00 cloth; $31.99 paper.The constitutional battles over creation of the New Deal gave way in the 1940s and 1950s, Joanna Grisinger argues in this evocative history, to increasingly narrow efforts at technical restructuring of the checks on the administrative state, and then to efforts to improve its efficiency. Put simply, opposition morphed into efforts at improvement.Grisinger focuses on three major efforts at restructuring: the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Legislative Reorgani- zation Act (LRA), adopted within months of each other in 1946, and the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of Gov- ernment (the Hoover Commission), begun the next year. The APA reformed procedures and increased judicial oversight; the LRA restructured congressional committee oversight; and the Hoover Commission tried to improve administrative efficiency and presi- dential control over agencies. Grisinger argues that these reforms mainly legitimated the growing administrative state: they gave the appearance of bringing it under the rule of law, congressional control, and executive direction. But they really accomplished little of these things.The book is divided into five chapters, plus a brief introduc- tion and conclusion. The first chapter shows how, by the late 1930s, opponents of the New Deal had given up their frontal assault on it and turned to complaints that its new agencies were acting unfairly. By this, they meant that agency procedures did not meet judicial standards of due process. The American Bar Association (ABA), for example, complained of agency hearings in which a single official would both hear (and decide) the case and represent the agency's position. Often, this official had managed the case from its inception, had consulted at length with other agency officials during the buildup to the hearing, and sometimes continued these consultations during the hearing. Conservative lawyers complained that this was hardly "due process." But the federal courts consistently accepted these sorts of procedures as constitutionally adequate. Justice Frankfurter declared that it would be inappropriate to turn administrative agencies into something like courts.So the critics turned to Congress for relief, and the path of reform there is the subject of chapter two. Its focus is the APA of 1946. The ABA's preferred solution, the Walter-Logan Act, would have thoroughly judicialized the administrative state. Roosevelt vetoed it and created a committee to draft an alterna- tive. Out of this came the APA. The APA famously separated the functions of rulemaking, adjudication, and prosecution within agencies, thus addressing the ABA's sharpest complaints. But this was a simple one-size-fits-all structure for federal agen- cies, and it required only a relaxed form of administrative due process. …

Nearly 15 years ago, Congress enacted sweeping legislative changes that altered the structure of the nation’s primary welfare program for poor families with children. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, was replaced by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF), which was authorized within a broader social welfare reform law, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA; U.S. Public Law 104-193). By the 1990s, most analysts, observers, politicians, advocates for the poor, and members of the general public—on the left and the right—seemed to have come to the general agreement that the old systems of social welfare and assistance did not work well. For example, welfare caseloads and rates of dependency on government programs had risen dramatically. There also were increases in the number of children being raised in singleparent households, where the poverty rate approached 30 percent (compared to 6 percent for two-parent families), even though more than