Objective. This study examines the ''congressional dominance'' model that is popular in the policy process literature. The purpose is to determine its explanatory power when the model is extended to include both the House and the Senate (rather than the current fascination with just the Senate), acting through both the appropriations and the oversight processes, in contrast to the literature's focus on so-called ''independent'' regulatory commissions. Methods. Using measures of legislator preferences and agency output, this research uses multiple regression to detect congressional influences on U.S. Forest Service outputs. Results. While congressional preferences do have detectable influence on Forest Service outputs, the overall influence (as indicated by model R(2)) is practically nonexistent. Conclusions. The results call the ''congressional dominance'' model into question, indicating that future efforts aimed at explaining policy outcomes would do well to extend the examination to include other actors in the process.
