## Notes from 06 October 2025 [[2025-10-06|← Previous note]] ┃ [[2025-10-07|Next note →]] I came across a paper today called _[Personnel is Policy: Delegation and Political Misalignment in the Rulemaking Process](https://lucabellodi.com/material/Personnel_is_Policy_Rulemaking.pdf)_ (2025) by Luca Bellodi and co-authors. The setup is simple: when bureaucrats who write federal rules don't share the president's political party, does it matter? The authors linked voter registration records to personnel data and tracked over 35,000 federal rules from 1997 to 2023. What they found is that misalignment is common - even for important rules. Democrats make up 63% of regulators versus 21% Republicans, so under any Republican administration, most rules end up written by people from the other party. But the reverse happens too, just less often. The paper shows that rules written by misaligned regulators take 8-10% longer to complete. They attract more negative public comments, produce wordier and less readable regulatory text, and face more legal challenges. From the president's perspective, that looks like a problem. But here's the thing: agency heads assign rules based mainly on technical expertise, not party affiliation. Regulators work on narrow subject areas, and expertise is concentrated. The authors calculate that if agency heads only assigned rules to politically aligned bureaucrats, they'd have to give up expertise on nearly one in five rules, about 36% of total available expertise. The authors don't say which choice is better. They note that bureaucratic resistance might constrain executive overreach, which could be desirable in specific contexts. But which contexts? Different policy areas may require different balances of autonomy and control. These tensions will always exist and shift depending on context, regime, or political moment. What the paper does is quantify the choice: more political control means less technical capacity; more expertise means more friction and, potentially, weaker democratic accountability. For anyone working on civil service reform, that's useful. It puts numbers on something we mostly argue about in the abstract - how much you lose when you optimize for one thing over the other.