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The federal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) of 1946 governs the way in which administrative agencies of the United States federal government may propose and establish regulations. The APA also sets up a process for federal courts to directly review agency decisions. As such, it is an important source of authority within federal American administrative law. The APA applies to both independent agencies and executive department agencies, and their subdivisions. U.S. Senator Pat McCarran called the APA "a bill of rights for the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose affairs are controlled or regulated" by federal government agencies. The text of the APA can be found under Title 5 of the United States Code, beginning at Section 500. The APA was enacted to review the modus operandi acceptable during a period of expanding federal governmental power, following the Great Depression and World War II. Beginning in 1933, Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress enacted several statutes that created new federal agencies. The statutes were part of Roosevelt’s New Deal legislative plan designed to deliver the United States from the social and economic hardship of the Great Depression. In a law journal article on the history of the APA, Fierce Compromise The Administrative Procedure Act Emerges from New Deal Politics, 90 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1557 (1996), professor George Shepard discusses the contentious political environment from which the APA was born. Shepard claims that Roosevelt’s opponents and supporters fought over passage of the APA "in a pitched political battle for the life of the New Deal" itself. (Ibid at 1562.) Shepard does note, however, that a legislative balance was struck with the APA, expressing "the nation’s decision to permit extensive government, but to avoid dictatorship and central planning." (Ibid at 1559.) A 1946 U.S. House of Representatives report discusses the 10-year period of "painstaking and detailed study and drafting" that went into the APA. (See Administrative Procedure Act, Report of the House Judiciary Committee, No. 1989, 79th Congress, 1946, at 8). Because of rapid growth in the administrative regulation of private conduct, Roosevelt ordered several studies of administrative methods and conduct during the early part of his four-term presidency. (Ibid.) Based on one study, Roosevelt commented that the practice of creating administrative agencies with the authority to perform both legislative and judicial work "threatens to develop a fourth branch of government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution."
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