Insiders Talk Guide to Executive Branch Agency Rulemaking: Policy, Procedure, Participation, and Post-Promulgation Appeal

This is a best practices manual for advocates attempting to influence lawmaking by executive branch agencies, that is, the adoption of rules and regulations enforceable on the public. This book rests on four foundations:

• "The execution of laws is more important than the making of them." (Thomas Jefferson) Agencies make administrative law to implement statutory. Rather than ending a process, a statute initiates a constitutional process, that is, agency adoption of administrative laws. Administrative laws, that is, rules and regulations implement legislative laws. Statutes are dead letters until the agency promulgates rules.

• You don't have a law until the agency tells you that you have a law. And you don't know what a law means until they tell you what it means. Agencies do both via rulemaking. Agency interpretation and application of legislative law via rulemaking constitute the real law. They are last in law making process making them first in authority. And agencies adopt many rules.

• For every one page of broad legislature-made law, agencies can make ten pages of highly detailed agency-made law. The law as applied is found in the minutiae of administrative rules through which agencies can implement or redirect legislation. In other words, 90 percent of the body of law regulating your principal(s) is written by executive branch agencies.

• Through rulemaking what the legislature gave, an executive agency can take away, and what the legislature wouldn't give, an executive agency might. For example, using agency discretion an agency can promulgate rules that extend benefits to one group to the exclusion of another.

And, to support the administrative state, taxpayers invest billions of dollars per year to employ and equip millions of state government workers. Each state has from dozens to hundreds of regulatory agencies, departments, boards, and commissions that implement public policy and adopt

and enforce regulations using legislatively delegated authority. They are the modern administrative state.

In terms of money, staff numbers, reach, and authority the administrative state dwarfs the executive, legislative, and judicial branches combined. While the legislative, executive, and judicial branches pursuant to the federal and state constitutions are coequal, in functional reality, the disproportionate size, power, wealth, and reach of the administrative state are so substantial that, since the 1930s, the administrative state has been called "the headless fourth branch of government." The strategies, skills, and techniques provided by this manual equip practitioners to achieve for their principals the best regulatory environment possible from the administrative state.

Robert L. Guyer is a writer and lecturer with Engineering THE LAW, Inc. in Gainesville, Florida. Previously he served as Legislative Counsel for the Ralston Purina Company; Manager of Legislative Affairs for Energizer Power Systems, and Gates Energy Products, Inc.; and as a contract lobbyist, Director of Legislative and Regulatory Affairs for the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation for which he lobbied internationally. Prior to becoming a lobbyist, he served as a pollution control inspector for a regulatory agency and later managed environmental compliance for an electric utility. He has written seven best-practices lobbying manuals, including the 6-volume Insiders Talk series and recorded the 15-video training seminar the Campaign Method for More Effective State Government Affairs. He provides live seminars publicly and privately. He holds degrees in political science, civil engineering, and law - all from the University of Florida - and is licensed to the practice of law in Florida and the District of Columbia.

Chris Micheli is a founding partner of the governmental relations and advocacy firm of Aprea & Micheli, Inc. He has substantial legislative and regulatory experience in the areas of state and local taxation, transportation, labor and employment, environmental, health care, civil liability, and insurance. As a legislative advocate, Micheli regularly testifies before policy and fiscal committees of the California Legislature, as well as a number of administrative agencies, departments, boards, and commissions. He regularly drafts legislative and regulatory language and is considered a leading authority on state tax law developments and California's knife laws. The Wall Street Journal called him "one of the top three business tax lobbyists in the state" and the Los Angeles Times described him as an "elite lobbyist." Over the last twenty years, he has published over eight hundred articles and editorials in professional journals, newspapers and trade magazines, whose diverse subjects range from tax incentives to transportation funding. He wrote a bi-monthly column on civil justice reform for five years for The Daily Recorder, Sacramento's daily legal newspaper, authoring over 100 columns. He has served on the editorial advisory boards for CCH's State Income Tax Alert, a nationwide publication, as well as State Income Tax Monitor, another national newsletter, and Sacramento Lawyer, a monthly legal journal. Micheli has been an attorney of record in several key cases, having argued before the Supreme Court of California (just two years out of law school), as well as the Court of Appeal several times. He has filed more than fifteen amicus curiae briefs in California courts. Additionally, Micheli has been qualified as an expert witness on California's knife laws in superior court, and has appeared as an expert witness before the State Board of Equalization in several key tax cases. He is a graduate of the University of California, Davis with a B.A. in Political Science - Public Service and the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law with a J.D. degree. He currently serves as an Adjunct Professor of Law at McGeorge where he teaches the course Lawmaking in California. He resides in Sacramento, California with his wife, Liza, two daughters, Morgan and Francesca, and son, Vincenzo.