Social security aff isn’t uniform

Delegation is part and parcel of politics because elected officials who write statutes and make policy rarely personally implement these directives on the ground. The central challenge in the design of government institutions is thus to provide street-level bureaucrats with sufficient authority to utilize their expertise while avoiding having this discretion be abused to pursue divergent policy goals. This dilemma remains at the heart of the study of bureaucratic politics. However, the dilemma presupposes a trade- off between the discretion thought necessary for bureaucratic effectiveness and democratic responsive- ness (e.g., Epstein and O'Halloran 1999, 6). In reality, there are ample arenas in which discretion and respon- siveness go hand-in-hand - with street-level bureau- crats exercising their authority in highly responsive ways. Across many policy areas, including Medicaid (Weissert 1994), occupational health and safety (Scholz 1986; Scholz, Twombly, and Headrick 1991), labor law (Schmidt 2002), Social Security disability insurance (Keiser 1999), and immigration (Lewis et al. 2013), local workers appear to use their discretion to align realized policy outcomes with the local community norms and values, even when their formal responsibil- ity is to implement otherwise identical statutory lan- guage. Such behavior is a different sort of bureaucratic responsiveness, one that may conflict with the clear intent of the legislators and elected executives who crafted the relevant legislation. In these and many other settings, discretion potentially brings about too much responsiveness rather than too little of it from the point of view the laws' authors.