With regulatory reform again on the presidential agenda, the history of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) provides a useful case study of organizational effectiveness. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan charged OIRA with imposing cost-benefit analysis on agency regulations, formalizing a new process of centralized regulatory review. But OIRA’s effectiveness flowed less from a single executive order than from the previous decade of presidential experimentation with regulatory review and Reagan’s continued investment in its institutionalization. This article draws extensively on archival documents to understand how regulatory review established itself as a constant of presidential management through the development of attributes such as staff capacity, organizational complexity, bureaucratic leverage, and reputation. Today’s policymakers should heed broader lessons for enhancing organizational effectiveness: singular structural and procedural changes are necessary, but not sufficient, for achieving reform.

Traditional accounts of the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments to the U.S. Constitution largely ignore the role of the major political parties. We argue that partisan politics was an integral part of the constitutional politics of this period. The need to manage divisions within both parties’ electoral coalitions during the transition from the third to the fourth-party systems led to the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment without support from either national party. While most accounts trace prohibition’s demise to widespread noncompliance and the graft it generated, we argue that elite congressional support for prohibition gave way when civil service reforms removed federal prohibition agents as patronage resources. We also argue that by giving states control of designing state conventions, and thereby risking state malapportionment of conventions, Democrats succeeded in overcoming the traditional fissures that divided their southern and northern wings.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan created a task force intended to gain the initiative on immigration reform. But immigration reform presented obstacles to his political stance in repudiation of his Democratic predecessors. After four years of wrangling, internally as well as with Congress, many on the Reagan team viewed the immigration task force as having shackled the president to an unwinnable issue. Frustrated politically, Reagan aides shifted focus to an emerging presidential tactic—the signing statement. This allowed the president to sign the Immigration Reform and Control Act while setting important precedents for his larger conservative agenda. The trajectory from presidential task force to presidential signing statement on immigration reform reveals the challenges Reagan faced on policy issues outside his core priorities, and also the development of a tactic to maneuver through the challenges. Immigration reform became less about immigration than about serving the administration’s larger core priorities.

The 1960s was a period of political opening for employment policy, when important questions about unemployment and economic insecurity were debated and a number of ambitious policies were enacted. Yet the Great Society’s employment policy agenda was also fundamentally limited in scope; it comprised interventions that reinforced rather than altered existing labor market mechanisms. Previous work suggests that primarily institutional factors were responsible for this constraint. By contrast, I contend that in addition to institutional factors, there was an ideological boundary condition on the era’s employment policy. The Johnson administration’s policymakers conformed to aspects of the liberal tradition in America, which limited policy options as well as the efficiency and efficacy of implemented policy.

This article examines New Deal public works agencies’ pivotal contributions to American aeronautical development, arguing that their creation of aviation-related infrastructure offers powerful evidence of the New Deal’s success in remaking the American landscape and fostering economic growth. Organizations such as the Civil Works Agency, the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration built or improved almost every contemporary U.S. airport, funding improvements that created the foundations of America’s modern air transport network. Much more than make-work endeavors, these efforts reflected New Dealers’ desire to use public works to create worthwhile products. These policies highlight the sophistication with which the New Deal promoted economic development, and belie the image of public works agencies privileging short-term employment to the detriment of economic gain. Airport terminals, runways, hangers, and countless other aviation-related improvements represent some of the New Deal’s most significant physical legacies, highlighting the Roosevelt administrations’ vital contributions to aeronautical development.

It is commonly accepted that innovation and economic prosperity after World War II were really spurred by the tremendous benefits of public investments. While public funding was crucial, a missing component of the historical analysis is a synthesis of the effects of these investments with changes in financial regulations enacted during the Great Depression, specific economic and employment policies, and the infusion of intellectual capital from scientists and engineers fleeing Nazi Germany and the turmoil of the war. The purpose of this article is to synthesize and analyze the effect of these three components—public polices, changes in private financial structures, and highly skilled immigration. This analysis will allow us to explore the broader impact and interdependence of knowledge creation, human and financial capital, and innovation.