It May Be Time to Give Up on Agency Adjudication | The Regulatory Review

Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Email Print complained that the officers who presided over those proceedings were biased, and studies supported the validity of those complaints. In 1946, Congress responded to those complaints by enacting the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). The APA includes several provisions that were carefully crafted to ensure that the administrative law judges (ALJs) who preside over agency adjudications—then called hearing examiners—are not biased in favor of the agencies where they preside. The most important of those statutory safeguards of decisional independence limited the power of an agency to remove an ALJ to circumstances in which the agency could prove that it had good cause to remove the ALJ.

In its 1950 opinion in Wong Yang Sung v. McGrath, the U.S. Supreme Court praised Congress for enacting the APA and suggested that the APA had codified the…