The description in Chapter 8 of the virtues of regulatory analysis presents an ideal view of comprehensive analytical rationality. As might be expected, the ideal suffers considerably in the real world where values conflict, the available information is never adequate, and quantitative techniques encounter huge uncertainties. Many students of government urge instead more realistic notions of “bounded rationality”. Because analysis is expensive and information-intensive, decisionmakers, in this view, can only muddle through by exploring a very limited range of options, relying heavily upon intuition and “back-of-the-envelope” predictions, and hoping for rapid feedback to meet limited short-term goals. Critics maintain that politics is inseparable from bureaucratic decisionmaking, and purely instrumental techniques deprive it of an important democratic dimension. One prominent student of the bureaucratic process has observed:

Regulatory analysts react very negatively to such suggestions, arguing that an informed decision is always better than one made in ignorance. They argue that analysis enhances democratic accountability by forcing agencies to make explicit value choices. Yet, as a purely descriptive matter, the muddling through model often appears to fit the decisionmaking process better than the comprehensive analytical rationality paradigm.