Bureaucracy and Oil Prices in Landman

From The Landman (Season 1, Episode 3)

Categories:

Run time: 1:48

Clip Description: Jon Hamm’s character in Landman is in a discussion about an employee who isn’t following government regulations. He goes on a rant about how inefficient the government is and how the rules and regulations are written by people who don’t really know the business.

American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: This is a useful clip for the politics of regulation: why Congress delegates rule-writing to agencies, how agencies exercise discretion in doing it, and the standing objection from regulated industries that the rules are written by people who do not know the work. The argument in the scene belongs to the character, and it works best put to students as a claim to evaluate rather than a conclusion to accept.

Possible Uses in Classroom: Use it when introducing the bureaucracy — rule-making authority, agency discretion, and the mechanisms through which agencies are held to account. It works well paired with an exercise asking students to state the strongest response a regulator could make to the complaint in the scene.

Discussion Questions

The complaint is that the rules are written by people who don’t know the business. That is a claim about expertise and who holds it. Federal agencies exist in part because Congress is not expert — they are staffed with specialists precisely so that safety rules are not written by legislators. So when an agency writes a rule for an oil rig, who is the expert: the agency engineer who has read every incident report in the country, or the operator who has worked this rig for twenty years? What would you need to know to decide?
Before a federal agency issues a significant rule it has to publish the proposal and take public comment, and the industry being regulated is almost always the best-organized commenter in the docket. That is either the system working as designed — the people who know the business get heard — or it is capture. From the outside, what evidence would tell the two apart?
The rant works because the speaker is charismatic and the regulation is offstage. Run the scene from the other end: a worker hurt on a rig, and a rule that would have prevented it. Does your sense of which rules are absurd survive the switch? Say what makes a regulation feel like nonsense to you, and whether that instinct is tracking actual cost or just tracking whose account you heard first.

Assignment

Go to regulations.gov and find one proposed federal rule — any agency, but pick an industry you know nothing about. Read the agency’s own justification and cost estimate, then read three comments opposing it and three supporting it. In two pages, reconstruct the strongest version of the regulated industry’s objection and the strongest version of the agency’s answer, and say which of the two was harder for you to write. Rulemaking dockets are public and largely unread; that is the point, since the argument in the clip is about documents almost nobody opens.

For AP Students

AP U.S. Government and Politics
Unit 2: Interactions Among Branches of Government

Topics: 2.12 The Bureaucracy; 2.13 Discretionary and Rule-Making Authority; 2.14 Holding the Bureaucracy Accountable
Skill: Source Analysis (4.B): explain how an argument relates to institutions and processes

A manager objects to an employee who is not following federal regulations and argues that the rules were written by people who do not understand the work. It is a one-sided argument delivered with conviction, which makes it better material for source analysis than a balanced one would be: students have to identify the claim, name the institution it targets, and supply the answer the clip does not give.

Discussion questions

Congress writes statutes in general terms and agencies write the specific rules. Explain why Congress delegates that way, then name one thing it gains and one thing it gives up.
State his argument in one sentence, as fairly as you can put it. Then state the strongest response an agency official could make.
Name three ways a federal agency can be held to account when its rules are bad. For each one, say who does the holding.

Short activity

Who wrote the rule? (15 minutes). Pick a regulation students actually run into — drinking age signage, food labeling, school bus standards, baggage rules. Four steps: which agency issued it, what statute gave that agency the authority, who could change it, and roughly how long changing it would take. Most students assume Congress wrote the rules they live under. Discovering that it usually did not, and that it delegated on purpose, is the substance of this part of the unit.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.