Enforcement divisions have sole heads who can make unilateral decisions that the commissioners never review. I'd just point out that at the end of the day, bro

Enforcement divisions have sole heads who can make unilateral decisions that the commissioners never review. I'd just point out that at the end of the day, broad power of social institutions are going to trump the overt lines of command. Capture in this context (and all contexts of regulatory capture) just mean that someone joins for a certain purpose, does all of the other tasks correctly and with high competence, but also makes sure their single issue is protected. Well, Regulatory capture can have a lot of meanings I suppose. One really pernicious phenomena is when things that don't have institutional power on their own ("the environment", "average people's health", overall cyber-security of the country, etc) get shunted aside for particular institutional interests (chemical companies, IoT sellers/consumers etc). This is the umbrella where "regulatory capture" lets these externalities run wild. Now, if you want to use "regulatory capture" as more akin the general phenomena known as "getting a seat at the table", know yourself out. The point is that seats of that allow some special consideration, yes, but you can't carve up existing institutions the EPA can carve up restrictions on pesticides. I wish it was the opposite, obviously but there you are.