The case for publishing delegation schedules
If delegated authority determines who decides, the schedules should not be internal documents.
There is a straightforward test for whether a government document should be public: does it determine who exercises power over public money?
Delegated-authority schedules pass that test unambiguously. They set out, officer by officer and threshold by threshold, who may commit the federal purse.
They are not published. They are not classified either. They occupy the large administrative space of documents that are simply not released because no one has been required to release them.
The objections to publication are practical rather than principled. Schedules change frequently. Publication would create a maintenance obligation. Officers would face lobbying pressure directed at specific thresholds.
None of these is trivial and none is decisive. Maintenance obligations attach to every public register. Lobbying pressure is an argument for transparency about who is lobbied, not for concealing who decides.
The stronger argument for publication is that the alternative is reconstruction. Journalists, auditors and researchers currently assemble an approximate picture from partial sources. An approximate picture of who controls spending is worse for the institutions than an accurate one.
