Originally published by The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission.

Public participation is one of the cornerstones of U.S. administrative law, and perhaps nothing better exemplifies its value than the notice-and-comment rulemaking process through which stakeholders can provide input on a proposed rule. Yet there remains an inherent tension in the democratic potential of this process. In reviewing final rules, courts demand that agencies demonstrate that those rules are responsive to any substantive comments they receive. But courts generally limit this requirement to comments containing legal or technical information.

This approach to judicial supervision of agency rulemaking is just one of many forces that have helped transform what should be a democratic rulemaking process into a technocratic exercise. On the plus side, expertise-centered rulemaking has substantially improved regulatory quality. These gains, however, have come with some important unintended consequences.

For one, the growing hegemony of technocratic decision-making dehumanizes the rulemaking process, resulting in an process that is unmoored from authentic human experiences—pain, hope, fear, loss—and from shared values like dignity, fairness, and justice. Worse still, overly technocratic rulemaking reinforces existing social inequalities by systematically excluding the voices of those who cannot “buy” the kind of specialized legal or …