Commentary The administrative state will get a new lease on life under President Joe Biden, but America’s administrative state is far more constrained than that of many other countries. Britain, for example, wrote its net-zero climate target into law after only a 90-minute debate in the House of Commons, without any examination of what the cost might be. Arguably the European Union is an administrative state, where the unelected European Commission proposes legislation, enforces it, and even levies billion-euro fines on companies without so much as a court hearing. By contrast, executive-agency rulemaking in the United States is more circumscribed. Agencies must show cause, respect precedent, and demonstrate that their rulemaking is properly grounded in the relevant statute and in a factual record sufficiently compelling to refute any suggestion that their action was “arbitrary or capricious.” They should expect controversial rules to be able to withstand challenges in the courts. In 2016, the Supreme …