Sunsets improve oversight and regulatory efficiency.

The regulatory reform movement of the 1970s promoted the use of sunset clauses as a mechanism to improve legislative oversight of the bureaucracy and to increase regulatory efficiency. As Christopher Mooney has written, "[t]he contemporary concept of sunsetting dates from the idealistic political reform movement of the 1970s, which sought to transform a U.S. government considered bloated, in-efficient, and beholden to special interests. ' 16 In The End of Liberalism, Theodore J. Lowi favored sunsets as a mechanism to reinvigorate stagnant government bureaucracies. 17 To counteract the problem of interest-group liberalism, in which bureaucratic agencies were often captured by the interests they were meant to regulate, Mooney writes, "Lowi suggested a 'tenure-of-statutes act' that would set a 'Jeffersonian limit of from five to ten years' on the life of every law creating a federal agency."' 18 "The objective," Mooney notes, "was less to make these agencies disappear than to use the termination date to achieve what Lowi called a 'guillotine effect,' sparking effective legislative oversight and possible reorganization of agencies that had grown too big for their britches." 19 On this view, sunsets can advance the public welfare by ensuring that legislation creating regulatory agencies that have outlived their purpose expire or are replaced by more current public policy tools. The impetus behind the sunset movement was to improve democratic accountability by subjecting bureaucratic agencies to periodic legislative oversight and control.