In Chapters 4 and 5, we used four organizational life cycle models to develop predictions for the trajectories of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s appropriations over the forty-year period from their births in 1970 through 2010. In this chapter, we review findings from our studies of the CEQ and EPA, and we offer a general assessment of the power of the theoretical agency life cycle models. We also employ a framework we developed for comparing the models and for classifying the key variables in those models. This framework provides a means to move beyond the constraints of the existing literature, in which life cycle models are placed in either the “internalist” or “externalist” camps. We framed our study of the CEQ and EPA with two general views of what happens to public organizations during the process of implementing public law. One view is that the life of the executive branch organization will be relatively stable and untroubled as its leaders and professional staff pursue the organization’s statutorily assigned mission. The underlying presumption here is that all of the important political questions related to the tasks assigned to the agency have been addressed in the public law itself. Consequently, the work of the agencies will be largely technical and uncontroversial. The alternative view is that the political struggle over the passage of the laws the agencies are supposed to implement continues during the implementation stage of the policymaking process. The supporters of the law, inside and outside government, support the agency and its efforts. The opponents of the law, however, not only oppose the agency but also attempt to derail, or at least delay implementation of, the law. Thus, an agency’s trajectory over time, in the form of its resources for and vigor in support of its assigned implementation tasks, will depend in large part on the balance of power, inside and outside government, between those who support and oppose the agency.
