Abstract: This is a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the United States Constitution. I provide and compare three organizing frameworks for the administrative state. The first examines its constitutionality, the second its democratic credentials, the third its epistemic and technocratic capacities. After describing each, I examine their interaction, and suggest that the administrative state is the setting for an endlessly shifting series of alliances between and among constitutionalists, democrats and technocrats.