Legislative Pillars of Administrative Bodies’ Functioning and Organizational Behavior Under recent Reforms

BACKGROUND The study addresses the pressing need to comprehensively update the legal status of administrative bodies in the context of ongoing public administration reform. These reforms are taking place under conditions of decentralization, digitalization, legitimacy crises, and rising public expectations. A key challenge is to determine the institutional, human, political, legal, technological, and social capacities required for effective transformation and to establish the principles guiding their implementation. MATERIALS AND METHODS The research applies modern doctrinal approaches to the legal status of public authorities and the principles of administrative law. It relies on formal-legal, structural-functional, logical-semantic, and comparative methods to clarify the legal nature of the administrative and legal status of public authorities. The study conceptualizes public authorities as subjects of state administration endowed with a legal status that is undergoing transformation in response to new societal and governance challenges. RESULTS The article develops a comprehensive definition of the legal status of an administrative body, integrating rights, duties, powers, responsibilities, and institutional features such as functions, resources, organizational structure, and position within the system of power. It identifies five core groups of conditions necessary for reform—namely institutional-organizational, personnel, political-legal, technological, and social-public. The study also defines a set of special principles that underpin reform implementation, including systemic integration, structural adaptability, personnel stability, participation, and legal legitimacy. CONCLUSION The findings contribute to the theoretical and practical understanding of administrative reform by offering a renewed conceptualization of the legal status of administrative bodies. The proposed framework provides a foundation for developing a regulatory model of public administration that is democratic, transparent, and effective, ensuring that governance structures are better equipped to meet contemporary challenges.