The other article, which she wrote alone, looked at the allocation of power between the White House and agencies. It defended presidents’ tightening grip over agencies and proposed that courts should give special deference to agency actions if the White House directed them.

Image Elena Kagan, the Supreme Court nominee, met with Senator Frank R. Lautenberg on Thursday. Credit... Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press

“When read together, both these articles point toward strong central control of the federal bureaucracy,” said Christopher S. Yoo, a University of Pennsylvania law professor. “The control goes to the agency head, and the agency heads are in turn accountable to the president.”

Ms. Kagan’s views place her within the center of a debate about the balance between making the bureaucracy more responsive to national elections and fears that excessive politicization could trump neutral expertise.

Among those who are critical of Ms. Kagan’s approach is Peter L. Strauss, a Columbia University law professor. He has argued that if Congress has delegated its lawmaking authority over some issue to an agency head, the president cannot legally order the agency to reach a certain result. That approach, he said, would concentrate too much power in the White House.

“It’s important that people understand that the president is commander in chief of the military forces, but he’s not commander in chief of domestic government,” Mr. Strauss said. “What he is in relation to domestic government is an overseer. He gets to counsel. He gets to call up an agency head and say, ‘I’d really like you to do this.’ I have no problem with that. But it isn’t the agency head’s legal obligation to obey him.”

Ms. Kagan’s writings suggest just the opposite. She analogized an agency head to the captain of a naval vessel: even though military regulations put the captain in charge of a ship, it is understood that his superior officer can give him orders. Similarly, she wrote, even if a statute delegates power to an agency head, it should be understood that the president can tell him what to do with that power.