BOOK REVIEW: NONFICTION : Bureaucracy--Protection From the Masses : POWER WITHOUT RESPONSIBILITY: How Congress Abuses the People Through Delegation <i> by David Schoenbrod</i> ; Yale University Press, $28.50, 260 pages

Bureaucrats have always been an object of fear, loathing and outright rage among conservatives, populists and libertarians. “Power Without Responsibility” is a prime example of bureaucrat-bashing, although the author rarely uses the “B-word.”

Instead, David Schoenbrod frames his argument in terms of what he calls delegation , a more elegant word that refers generally to the efforts of Presidents, lawmakers and judges to shirk the responsibility for governing the country by passing along the real work to unelected agency officials. But make no mistake--when Schoenbrod refers to unelected agency officials, he means bureaucrats.

“Delegation has produced a regulatory system so cumbersome that it cannot provide the protection that people do need, so large that it needlessly stifles the economy, and so complex it keeps voters from knowing whom to hold accountable for the consequences,” Schoenbrod declares.

“Power Without Responsibility,” however, is not merely an attack on the bureaucrats. Indeed, Schoenbrod is less concerned about the bureaucrats who wield the power to regulate than the cowardly folks who gave them the power in the first place.

“When Congress delegates,” he explains, “it tends to do only half its job.”

In other words, the politicians who must face the electorate prefer to set warm and fuzzy goals and then leave the hard work of achieving the goals to regulatory agencies. Delegation is “the course of least resistance,” says Schoenbrod, and allows the politicians to campaign on their promises rather than on their achievements. Meanwhile, the problems do not simply go away--they are addressed, however imperfectly, by men and women whose names never appear on a ballot.

“So (Congress) promises clean air without restricting polluters and higher incomes for farmers without increasing the price of groceries,” Schoenbrod writes. “The key conflicts . . . inevitably surface when the agency tries to translate the popular abstractions of the statutory goals such as ‘clean’ air and ‘orderly’ agricultural markets into rules of conduct.”

Schoenbrod is a professor at New York Law School, and he makes his argument against delegation in terms of constitutional history, legal theory and elaborate paradigms of governance. He discusses agricultural price regulation, clean air standards and abortion counseling, at length and in detail, as case studies of government-by-bureaucracy. But even his scholarly historical asides are calculated to make the point that delegation is not just bad but downright evil.

For example, he cites the New Deal as the equivalent of a bureaucratic coup d’etat in American government: “Covert and limited delegation,” he writes, turned “into overt and massive administrative lawmaking.” And he quotes no less an authority than Mussolini on the subject of the National Industrial Recovery Act, one of the key enactments of the New Deal: “ Ecco un ditatore ! (Behold a dictator!)”

Schoenbrod is willing to give us the arguments in favor of delegation, although only in passing and only to knock them down again. Delegation, Schoenbrod points out, is supposed to permit elected public officials to avoid the influence of special interests and to allow decisions to be made by “experts who can base their decisions solely upon a cool appraisal of the public interest.”

But Schoenbrod devotes the bulk of his book to refuting these arguments. “Broad delegation,” he writes, “helps to insulate Congress and the White House from political accountability for supporting laws that are harmful to the broad public interest.”

Above all, Schoenbrod insists that delegation by Congress to the bureaucracy is flatly unconstitutional, and “Power Without Responsibility” is both a political tract and a legal brief in support of his argument.

The author is untroubled by the fact that the Supreme Court does not agree with him on this point. Indeed, he calls on the courts to see the light of truth and get to work on dismantling the regulatory system that both Schoenbrod and Mussolini dismiss as dictatorial.

Policy wonks and C-SPAN junkies will probably appreciate the vigor of Schoenbrod’s arguments and the detail of his documentation, but I suspect that most readers would be satisfied with an essay on the Op-Ed page. But Schoenbrod is too ambitious to content himself with a mere opinion piece--he is trying to write himself, and his ideas, into the lawbooks.

“It’s time for a little perestroika on the Potomac,” the author cracks at the end of his book. But, as we come to understand, Schoenbrod is not smiling when he says it.