Implementation is at the core of lawmaking in our divided government. A rich literature covers the waterfront with respect to agencies’ implementation of legislative mandates, and another equally robust line of scholarship considers Congress’s implementation of treaties. Missing from those discussions, however, is another area of implementation central to U.S. foreign relations: the implementation of transnational regulatory agreements.

This Article examines how federal agencies have harnessed far-reaching discretion from Congress on whether and how to implement thousands of international agreements. Agencies regularly implement agreements by relying on a self-developed menu of options, much like they do in the domestic regulatory context—only without the checks and balances that those processes provide. This analysis of the operation of agreements presents a set of extemporized means through which the executive maintains control of these agreements and their regulation of the rights of private actors without legislative intervention or administrative law constraints. These revelations stand in contrast with conventional understandings of implementation as well as to prior accounts of how “international law [is] part of our law.”

在我们分裂的政府中，执行是立法的核心。丰富的文献涵盖了关于机构执行立法任务的滨水区，另一个同样强大的学术研究考虑了国会对条约的执行。然而，这些讨论遗漏了另一个对美国外交关系至关重要的实施领域：跨国监管协议的实施。

本文探讨了联邦机构如何利用国会对是否以及如何实施数千项国际协议的广泛自由裁量权。各机构依靠自主开发的选项菜单定期执行协议，就像他们在国内监管环境中所做的那样——只是没有这些流程提供的制衡。这种对协议运作的分析提出了一套即兴手段，行政部门通过这些手段在没有立法干预或行政法约束的情况下维持对这些协议的控制及其对私人行为者权利的监管。这些启示与对实施的传统理解以及先前关于“国际法[是]我们法律的一部分”的解释形成鲜明对比。