Title: Administrative Agencies: Their Structure and Powers
Headings: 5.1
Administrative Agencies: Their Structure and Powers

5.1 Administrative Agencies: Their Structure and Powers
Learning Objectives
Why Have Administrative Agencies?
Why Regulate the Economy at All?
Ideal Conditions for a Free Market
History of Federal Agencies
Classification of Agencies
Powers of Agencies
The Constitution and Agencies

Content: By the early part of this century, the ICC gained the power to fix rates. From the 1970s through 1995, however, Congress passed deregulatory measures, and the ICC was formally abolished in 1995, with its powers transferred to the Surface Transportation Board. Beginning with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914, Congress has created numerous other agencies, many of them familiar actors in American government. Today more than eighty-five federal agencies have jurisdiction to regulate some form of private activity. Most were created since 1930, and more than a third since 1960. A similar growth has occurred at the state level. Most states now have dozens of regulatory agencies, many of them overlapping in function with the federal bodies. Classification of Agencies
Independent agencies are different from federal executive departments and other executive agencies by their structural and functional characteristics. Most executive departments have a single director, administrator, or secretary appointed by the president of the United States. Independent agencies almost always have a commission or board consisting of five to seven members who share power over the agency.