Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-2026

Abstract

Reason giving has long been understood to legitimate administrative agency actions by assuring legal, nonarbitrary, stable, and well-considered decisions. It is core to the Administrative Procedure Act's process and judicial review provisions. But the obligation to give reasons is receiving a challenge from the political accountability side, as executive orders skyrocket and the Supreme Court moves towards unitary executive theory in decisions such as Trump v. Slaughter and Seila Law v. CFPB. In striking down independent agencies under Article II, the Court has emphasized that political accountability of agencies to the President is critical. Both the President and executive agencies have now gone further to claim regularly that relying on "the President said so" is not just critical, but sufficient to legitimate an agency decision, and no further reasons need be given.

This article seeks to make four contributions to the controversy. I argue first that although reliance on presidential directives can sometimes usefully supplement agency reasoning, as a matter of statutory interpretation, "the President said so" cannot undercut the reasoning and analytical requirements that would otherwise apply to an agency action. Presidential statements, unlike statutes, generally cannot change the legal regime. Second, I argue that, special circumstances aside, the APA continues to apply when a statute delegates power directly to the President, because the best interpretation of such run-of-the-mill statutes is that Congress anticipated that agencies would act and the usual administrative law framework would apply. Third, and relatedly, the article argues that Franklin v. Massachusetts, a decision that presidential transmission of census data to Congress was exempt from the APA, applies properly only to exceptional statutory delegations to the President. Finally, the Article argues from a normative frame that not only are reasons critical to ensure well-considered nonarbitrary agency policy, they are also critical for democratic accountability. Existing literature focuses on deliberative democracy, but reasons are essential even for non-deliberating voters to cast a meaningful vote and thus to assure political accountability.

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© 2026 University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Reproduced with permission.

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