In general, the United States has delegated the important job of setting industry-wide standards to the private sector. This development, though, was hardly inevitable. When Congress created the Bureau of Standards in 1900, the leaders of this new federal bureaucracy sought to play a key role in setting the nation’s standards.
It immediately encountered intense resistance, and eventually found itself in an uneasy relationship with an ascendant private organization dedicated to this same task: the American Engineering Standards Committee. This organization decisively seized the powers of standards setting from the federal government and transferred it to the private sector.
This paper examines how this happened. At first, during the heyday of the “associative state” during the 1920s, the powers of AESC remained relatively circumscribed. But during the New Deal, when the scope of the federal government grew dramatically in every other respect, business interests managed to commandeer the power to set standards for themselves. This move, largely forgotten now, would have profound consequences for the evolution of the regulatory state in the postwar era.