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Dan Walters

@profdanwalters.bsky.social
7.6K followers 1.4K following 983 posts

Law professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, specializing in administrative law. Views are mine alone. Dog pictured is Oliver Wendell Holmes Walters Jr. (RIP 2025) law.tamu.edu/faculty-staff/find-peo…

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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Interestingly, we find that this tendency is most pronounced among textualist respondents, and that the pattern sharply reverses when we them statutes that clearly rule out a delegation of discretion. Our textualist Court might need to update priors about textualism's valence.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
New paper 🚨: SCOTUS has made democratic theory a central part of its consolidation of presidential power over agencies, but its democratic vision is chock full of empirical and normative holes, which I unpack in a forthcoming essay in the Duke Law Journal. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
Yes, and 99 percent of coal plants failed when there was no more coal on hand... I am truly at a loss for words to describe how obtuse and/or manipulative this message from the Department of Energy is.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Slaughter was not just about removal--it was a "conceptual revolution." Taken seriously, it implies one of two futures: an ineffective government hobbled by courts limiting the president's power, or courts holding back and enabling a power grab. What a choice. www.theregreview.org/2026/07/22/b...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
This is what happens when you give a corrupt president the power to micromanage agency statements on exigent threats to public safety. Just saying.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
It's really stunning to read JD Vance, a grown man and second in line to lead out country, admitting that he sees the world and our country's political divides in terms of a battle between literal angels and demons.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Love seeing my friend and co-author Gabe Scheffler do the yeoman's work of rebutting, point-by-point, the strategies of "obfuscation" being employed by the Trump administration to cover up the fact that they gutted Medicaid.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
I've looked at Slaughter closely and Justice Sotomayor is right that the majority does not take the time to reassure us, as it did in Free Enterprise Fund, that its formalistic reasoning will not eventually reach the civil service. That retreat into silence is incredibly disconcerting.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
This passage from Justice Gorsuch is just so revealing of the tortured psychology of the Court's motivations: we have to risk authoritarianism in order to understand the necessity of building a libertarian utopia; there is no alternative between authoritarianism and absolute economic freedom.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Avid golfer here. Had the privilege of playing East Potomac Golf Links this spring, and it's fine just how it is. It's one of like two or three public courses in DC. I would be livid if I lived there and had to watch this active theft of a great public resource in my backyard.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
The Landor case is emblematic of this Court's arbitrary, uninformative style of judgment about Congress's drafting. Here are several different ways to do the same thing Congress tried to do, but the statute Congress actually wrote just doesn't work for...reasons we just made up.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 05/05/2026
Things must be really, really bad at DOJ right now.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
I really am profoundly concerned that the Court not only seems to view partisan gerrymanders as nonjusticiable (Rucho), but also as a state right that needs to be secured (Rucho + Callais). I can stomach being told that courts can't stop something bad, but this is just too much.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
Our constitutional democracy really does seem to rely on 1) the assumption that presidents will understand their own limitations and seek to build bridges before just acting; and 2) the assumption that if presidents don't do that, there will be legal pushback. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/o...
Guida: Trump is roughly in line with, say, Joe Biden’s approval rating for much of his term. But both are and were, by historic standards, unpopular. What does this level of unpopularity do to the incentive structure for someone sitting the White House?

Britton-Purdy: My worry is that the administration’s vulnerability and its dangerousness are essentially linked. The weakness isn’t just unpopularity, but what seems like a commitment to plowing forward without majority support — first in the unpopular and aggressive immigration crackdown, now in the unpopular war with Iran, which was sprung on Americans without a serious or consistent rationale The temptation to move to more authoritarian tactics emerges organically from the failure to take democratic politics seriously — which Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and, to name a conservative president who achieved some constitutional-regime change, Ronald Reagan, all did.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
So what do we think: does Sage exist?
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Relatedly, what in the world is this theory that the patronage system got away from the president, necessitating reforms to help the president reassert control? I've never seen this revisionist history before.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
OPM's Schedule Policy/Career rule just dropped, and apparently OPM is under the impression that the President makes a constitutional decision about whether to "delegate" his Article II authority to career civil servants. They think all he's doing now is reclaiming that constitutional authority.

 In order to execute his Article II duty to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, the
vast expansion in the scope and complexity of Federal law has required the President to delegate
such authority to thousands of career civil servants involved in policy formulation.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
Boeing over here just drooling at the idea that DOT/FAA are going to draft AI regulations that are (intentionally!) word salad. www.propublica.org/article/trum...
The answer from the plan’s boosters is simple: speed. Writing and revising complex federal regulations can take months, sometimes years. But, with DOT’s version of Google Gemini, employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds, two DOT staffers who attended the December demonstration remembered the presenter saying. In any case, most of what goes into the preambles of DOT regulatory documents is just “word salad,” one staffer recalled the presenter saying. Google Gemini can do word salad.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
On this front, here's a teaser of results from a paper with @briandfeinstein.bsky.social that I'm about to post to SSRN. In a conjoint survey experiment, we tested how ordinary people process the tradeoff between opportunities for participation and efficiency of decisionmaking.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 22/10/2025
Really interesting from @donmoyn.bsky.social: the ball is up in the air in the court of public opinion when it comes to the value of independence in administration. Lots of tactical implications of this for our politics. open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
Remarkable that just a year out from Loper Bright you have judges who were previously Chevron critics beginning opinions this way. media.cadc.uscourts.gov/opinions/doc...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 16/09/2025
What a cool diagram from @jamesgoodwin.bsky.social and @progressivereform.bsky.social showing the changes from the Fall 2024 Unified Agenda to the (recently issued) Spring 2025 Unified Agenda. progressivereform.org/cpr-blog/tru...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 06/09/2025
Just because you don't pay doesn't mean you don't pay.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
This argument (let me do the illegal thing because paying people back would take me back to square one) is truly stupid, but I'm not gonna lie--it probably will work with the Supreme Court. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 23/08/2025
There's just no serious argument that these things are good, as evidenced by Cato sounding the alarm. The biggest question in the world right now is how soon a distracted public will figure out that it matters for them more than grievance symbolism. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/b...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
As J. Jackson points out, the Court is running a precedential shell game where unreasoned or barely rationalized emergency orders become the sole basis for later emergency orders. Whatever this is, it's not responsible or law-like.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 19/08/2025
I can't recall seeing this kind of deregulation-in-the-face-of-industry-preferences before. Not a great sign for court review, but it's also making me feel better about the possibility that maybe they're going to win and unleash climate torts. www.npr.org/2025/08/19/n...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
Very excited that my article "Informational Administration" will appear in the Stanford Law Review's special administrative law issue next year! You can download the draft at papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers..... It's still a work-in-progress, so comments are very much welcome.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
Judges Katsas and Rao are really on a rampage in the DC Circuit right now nixing lower court injunctions blocking impoundment and dismantling of agencies, all on justiciability, but the en banc court better listen to Judge Pillard, who has common sense on her side. www.law360.com/appellate/ar...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 26/07/2025
This is one of the most idiotic things I've ever read. These people have no idea how anything works and just expect AI to magically solve every problem in the world. Snake oil. www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 11/07/2025
I will be very curious to see where the jobs-cut numbers land when this is all said and done. This initiative has all the hallmarks of Trump's meager, largely symbolic efforts on regulatory rollbacks during his first term. Make a big pronouncement, declare mission accomplised, then fail.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 23/06/2025
Well, whether that's true or not (I have no idea), it doesn't seem to have been true here, at least until the Vietnam War era. www.stevevladeck.com/p/bonus-158-...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
Finally official! Looking forward to the next chapter and to having the freedom to take some scholarly risks in the name of knowledge, understanding, and progress.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 04/06/2025
LMAO at this "Permitting Data and Technology Standard" just issued by the Trump administration--ostensibly to streamline permitting processes--that reads like a tech bro ukase. permitting.innovation.gov/resources/da...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
This is such a feeble attempt to insulate the Fed from the obviously destabilizing implications of effectively foreshadowing intent to overrule Humphrey's Executor. You could easily have said NLRB/MSPB are "uniquely" structured to fall within the "exception" created by Seila Law. Didn't matter.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 02/05/2025
It was heartbreaking to let go of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. today. Those of you lucky enough to meet him know he was a special, special guy that meant the world to me. I'm not sure what to do now, but if you have a second to pet your furry friend and think about Oliver, it would make me happy.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
An economy built on a race to the bottom. www.theverge.com/openai/64813...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
I see we're dispensing with standing analysis in two sentences now.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Justice Jackson is not pulling punches.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
I know it's Portland, but there's nowhere to stand.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 05/03/2025
The four arch conservatives join a blustery dissent calling this an act of "judicial hubris." Notable because these four are constantly complaining, when they happen to be in a 5-4 or 6-3 majority, about liberal dissents saying the same thing. Hard to take these people seriously.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
It's telling that Justice Barrett joined the liberals in dissenting--something of a pattern in EPA cases (think of Ohio v. EPA). Barrett, a legitimate textualist, wants nothing to do with this hackery. She can tell just as well as we all can that this is heads I win, tails you lose jurisprudence.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
The Court instead says that "limitations" implies more concrete "implementation." Never mind that EPA thought it was just fine to state the goal and let regulatees figure out a cost-effective way to comply. Now EPA has to be sufficiently prescriptive in the specific means of obtaining a goal.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 04/03/2025
As if we needed another institution of government just going off the rails, SCOTUS just said that a statute requiring EPA to put "limitations" on pollution in water permits does not authorize performance standards: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 22/02/2025
It took me too long to do it, but better late than never.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 18/02/2025
From DOJ's filing on the TRO in the State appointments clause challenge: Musk has no authority to order anyone to do anything. I can't help but wonder how many acting officials in agencies were under the impression that he did have authority, and how many would have refused had they known.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
I picked a bad day to pick up Ginsburg and Huq's "How to Save a Constitutional Democracy." We're there...
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 09/02/2025
Strong "when the president does it that means it's not illegal" vibes.
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Dan Walters @profdanwalters.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
Granted, there is this reference in 205 that seems to contemplate that SGEs could have "official responsibility" as part of their designated duty:
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