Regulatory peer review - in which independent scientists comment on the technical underpinnings of proposed regulations - is a recently pursued form of political control of the bureaucracy. This paper situates regulatory peer review in the context of both the history of technical advice to government and the principal-agent perspective often used to explain the presence of administrative procedures. We introduce two novel concepts to accommodate regulatory peer review: Technocracy, a consequence of information asymmetries, is a form of bureaucratic drift in which the preferences of technical experts displace public preferences. Epistemic drift, an explanatory category akin to bureaucratic or coalitional drift, is a change in embodied knowledge that contributes to departures from the policy intentions of an enacting coalition. In addition to introducing these concepts, we argue that regulatory peer review is more complex than other administrative procedures, and that its efficacy critically depends on the details of its implementation. We hypothesize that regulatory peer review will cause non-governmental participants in regulatory conflicts to devote more effort to creating research and other epistemic resources. But we also hypothesize that, just as courts have become more politicized with their role in regulatory policy, peer review and regulatory science will become increasingly politicized as well.