Independent of ground---not specifying an agent destroys education over implementation which is the crux of where we gather knowledge from---focus should be applied on resolving those issues

God and the devil are in the details of policymaking, as they are in most other important things-and the details are to be found at the agency level. This would remain true, moreover, even if the nondelegation doctrine were revived and statutes were written with somewhat greater specificity, for many of the most significant impacts on members of the public would still be indeterminate until the agency grappled with and defined them.

Finally, the agency is often the site in which public participation is most effective. This is not only because the details of the regulatory impacts are hammered out there. It is also because the agency is where the public can best educate the government about the true nature of the problem that Congress has tried to address. Only the interested parties, reacting to specific agency proposals for rules or other actions, possess (or have the incentives to acquire) the information necessary to identify, explicate, quantify, and evaluate the real-world consequences of these and alternative proposals. Even when Congress can identify the first-order effects of the laws that it enacts, these direct impacts seldom exhaust the laws' policy consequences. Indeed, first-order effects of policies usually are less significant than the aggregate of more remote effects that ripple through a complex, interrelated, opaque society. When policies fail, it is usually not because the congressional purpose was misunderstood. More commonly, they fail because Congress did not fully appreciate how the details of policy implementation would confound its purpose. Often, however, this knowledge can only be gained through active public participation in the policymaking process at the agency level where these implementation issues are most clearly focused and the stakes in their correct resolution are highest.