I am not sure that the agencies' goal is self perpetuation so much as money laundering. I used to believe it was, but after seeing the levels of graft and spend the past two months, I am reevaluating my beliefs. If agencies were being wasteful and spending on themselves directly (lavish offices, junkets, bloated wages, etc.) I would expect perpetuation was their goal. Instead it looks like there is a phenomenal amount of money going out to political supporters, to the extent that it is starting to look like most of what they do is come up with ways to funnel money from the federal government's coffers to their friends and supporters.
That may be a bit of a distinction without a difference, but I also suspect that money goes largely to one set of friends and supporters, probably oh 90-99% of it based on the voting patterns of the greater DC area. That suggests to me that anything that cuts down the bureaucracy is a net win for the right, because the bureaucracy is going to support the left no matter what. It may have taken 80+ years for the right to really grasp that fact.
It's not really accurate to try to model "the agencies" or to personify these organizations and describe the various behaviors as arising out of clear motives.
What's more accurate is to picture it like an episode of The Sopranos when the small business owner has been set up as a mark for blackmail or to accumulate huge gambling debts or whatever, and the mafia basically takes a controlling interest. Now on the one hand, you have the actual profitable business, ordinary employees and managers just doing their job, serving real customers and providing good value honestly, paying taxes, and spending money on contracts with suppliers in a way that is totally normal, legitimate, justified, above-board, etc.
But to THE MAFIA which had secretly taken control of the enterprise in a way invisible to customers, employees, shareholders, etc. the business is more than just a money maker as they levy their own "taxes" on the profits. To be sure, the smart mafia understands it wants to keep the goose that lays the golden eggs alive indefinitely and should resist bleeding it too dry too fast which could end the party prematurely by drawing unwanted attention or killing the enterprise prematurely.
But still, they aren't going to stop at mere "taxes" / protection money, etc. Because, being a legitimate business, the cover story of the ordinary operations, and the legal structure and financial authorities of the organization, create all kinds of juicy opportunities for so much more, like embezzlement, money laundering, tax evasion, corruption, spoils-system-like favor-paying and fake employment for friends and family, diversion of "union dues" and frauds public and private of infinite variety. Which, duh, the mafia is not doing to be scrupulous and resist those temptations out of a commitment to common virtue and dedication to the public good, but of course they are going to exploit each and every one of those opportunities to the maximum extent they think they can get away with with, to include trying to make all those activities as hard to uncover and prosecute and look as technically legally defensible as possible. Yes, even claim to be morally defensible, and in some circumstances they even have a point - consider the famous opening scene from The Godfather in which the mortician's appeal to Don Corleone is specially for the justice the system has failed to provide.
Now, if you look at the organization from the outside, it seems like an ordinary small successful and honest business run by good workers. If you look at the books with forensic accountant, you see a shell that is a veil covering for a nasty mafia operation. Which is it? It's both, it's a hybrid, it's a kind of symbiosis, but with a firewall keeping the legitimate side of things ignorant from what is really happening on the other side.
THAT'S what started happening to the agencies, eventually to all of them, eventually as far as things could be taken.
The question of course is when, having discovered a beloved home is infested with termites in this way, weather one should even bother with trying to kill just the termites and replace only the damaged beams to try to preserve the worthy structure, or whether things have gone too far for salvage, and, while tragic and cruel, there's still no better alternative to burning it all down and starting over.
Your comment assumes that the agencies have a legitimate purpose that produces value. For some that is probably true, and for others it seems to be just a function of money laundering, with any positive outcomes merely incidental.
In your model, it matters whether an institution is 5% mafia or 95% mafia, after all. 100% is still on the table, however.
Beyond a few anecdotes, what is your evidence that anything close to 90% goes to friends and supporters?
90% of what? Certainly not of the entire federal budget. Of descetionary spending that includes all employee salaries? What from the farm bill(s) and weapons contracts is part of the 90%?
90% of the money being misappropriated via money laundering is going to friends and supporters of Democrats is the claim. That paragraph makes no attempts to guess the ratio of total spend that is legitimately towards the proper goals of the organization vs other illegitimate spend.
I call bullshit on less than 10% going to friends of Republicans.
And you seem to miss that these agencies are all headed by political appointees at a much lower level than Secretaries. They have immense power to control what bureaucrats do and don't do. What they lack is the ability to change Congressional legislation.
I would bet 90-99% if what you don't like under a Democrat President is controlled by his appointees, not civil service bureaucrats. I think your blame is misplaced.
I made my argument. Take it or not. Maybe we will find that under Bush USAID was funneling all its money to NGO's run by Republicans. I wouldn't bet on it, but Old Mitch has been in government so long for a reason.
You are losing the last shreds of respect I have of you. You're comments are as blindly biased as many liberals I know. You are worried about under story trees (USAID) when there are redwoods and sequoias out there (DOD). And those are more likely to favor friends of GOP (or local Congressional interests of either party).
My concern about this "accountability first and foremost" approach is that it seems impossible for everyone with power to be accountable. On this auditor model, it doesn't seem like the chief auditor will be accountable. Unless they're accountable to the president, but then you are back to the same problem Arnold is talking about of too much power consolidated in the presidency.
I am also troubled by the problems of the bureaucracy. But one nice feature of the status quo is that the unaccountable civil servants don't individually have much power.
Collectively they do have a lot of power though. The problem seems to be worst when they are all aligned with the same ideology. An ideologically diverse, individually weak and unaccountable civil service might be the best of all possible worlds... But how do you get there from here?
Transparency provides a type of accountability that is all its own. Notice that many of these announcements had to be uncovered because they had been covered up in the first place.
Of course, but it's not about the public. Even the elite pros with the best FOIA-Foo possible were basically unable to deal with the latest escalations and innovations in the fraud-laundering arms race.
In what sense does that small subset provide a reliable check against wrongdoing, when the public doesn't have the good judgment to listen to the subsets that get to the truth?
"...but then you are back to the same problem Arnold is talking about of too much power consolidated in the presidency."
I usually agree with Arnold, but on this point he seems just wrong.
All of us who lean Arnold agree there is too much power in Washington and it should be rolled back.
Probably all of us agree that Congress has given away too much of its power to the Executive branch, and Congress should take it back, or SCOTUS should force them to.
But the idea that THE PRESIDENT shouldn't have complete control of the Executive branch is just foolish.
Because it means you are saying that the inmates should run the asylum.
The American people who voted for Trump know better than the chattering class trying to defend the bureaucracy that this is wrong. The events of the last 16 years under Democrat presidents - and even under Trump 45 - demonstrate this clearly.
Part of Congress' power is to say how much can be spent and how much must be spent. It seems the later is what DOGE is trying to take for executive power. It isn't theirs to take.
And yet Biden and Obama each chose not to spend money that had been allocated. So unlike what the press indicated, Trump is hardly unique in that.
Biden not spending money allocated to building the wall, e.g. Check out Proclamation 10142
Separately, Congress has some years now given the executive branch some discretion on exactly where to spend said money in broad categories. So DOGE is now uncovering specifics that are shocking many of us, while not surprising some.
I've been retired 6 years now. When I retired I'm pretty sure USACE (corps of engineers) was the only agency that had Congressional authority to reallocate funds. And they still had to spend it all.
Certainly most agencies DO NOT have that authority.
In fact Congress now frequently grants agencies discretion over exactly where the money goes within categories.
But re whether or not Congress allocates each dollar to each external group, you don’t need to trust me, go look it up yourself.
As to whether presidents MUST spend every dollar Congress authorizes, go check that out yourself too. Again, Trump is NOT the first here by any means, despite what the press would have you believe.
From a very simple ChatGPT query:
“The Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse under Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, which states that ‘No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.'
However, the Constitution does not explicitly require the executive branch to spend all money that Congress authorizes. This has led to disputes over whether the president has the discretion to impound (withhold) funds appropriated by Congress.”
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 supposedly forces the President to spend all dollars Congress authorizes, but there is a good chance it will not stand up to constitutional challenge.
And despite it, both Obama and Biden fought spending allocated money.
But again, don’t trust me - or ChatGPT - go look it up yourself.
Within categories? Sure. Within the category the legislation Congress says the money is for, agencies can move. They can't move it to something DIFFERENT than what Congress says it is for ...except USACE.
Lol. Not consitutional. Very little is constitutional, certainly not to that specificity. It has a very short document.
Legislation was passed during or shortly after Nixon because he didn't spend on some things he didn't like. It is a legal requirement, if Congress says it is to be spent, as opposed to saying it CAN BE spent, which they rarely do.
Biden and Obama fought WITH Congress for approval not to spend. They didn't do it unilaterally
As I've always brought up anytime Arnold pushes his COO / CAO model is it will fail for exactly that reason. We already have that model, it's called OSC and the IGs and both are the equivalent of municipal police department internal affairs, police review boards, the bar, medical review boards, appellate court, etc they in practice exist solely to whitewash, legitimatize, and protect those they are supposed to be doing oversight of.
The CAO quickly becomes the modern equiv of an elected state AG, simply a mandatory stepping stone to higher office to be overtly abused to maximize that future political run. It's the incentive problem and neither a COO/COA will fix that.
If you want to fix the problem, you simply need to make individual bureaucrats liable, i.e. if you can prove waste, the bureaucrat is personally on the hook for paying it non dischargable in bankruptcy. If a defendant is found not guilty, the prosecutor is debarred and permanently so. If a person isn't charged, the arresting cop has to pay that person $1000 per day of incarceration non dischargable. If appellate court overrules a judge that judge gets 25% the damages on himself whether that is money (civil) or prison (criminal).
There simply is no skin on the game for bureaucrats, that's fundamentally the problem and it's not "accountability" as must use it (i.e. elections or fired), it needs to be the same level accountability you and I have, i.e. civil, criminal, negligence standards, etc
We already have that de facto in the US. The problem in that ST:TNG episode is you know that didn't apply to the government official trampling that flower to arrest you.
The problem isn't these things don't exist, they already do, just for me and you, not bureaucrats which are insolated from any meaningful oversight or consequences.
I think one thing is that a new Chief Auditor must replace the old one at least every 5 years. And to the extent possible, the ne Chief Auditor should be an opponent of the old one AND responsible for anything he misses that the old one got wrong.
Smart businesses and local governments change auditing firms at least every 5 years, and stuff still gets missed (Dixon, IL), but it improves your chances.
Smart businesses and governments don't and I say that as a former regulatory auditor. The organizational point of a formal audit is to pass, you pass those by giving repeat business to external auditors who are fully aware who butters their bread.
LOL. Perhaps I should have phrased it differently.
And of course not even changing auditors helps every time. There is a fair bit of incestuousness going on, for sure.
You may enjoy this story, though.
Decades ago (mid-1980s) the State of Illinois suddenly decide that all the "small grain elevator" (less than 1M bushel storage) had to get a certified audit. First problem, none of them had ever had even a qualified audit, and a large majority had never had any kind of audit at all.
So. I owned such an elevator at the time. My year ended May 30 (for practical reasons), and I contacted Peat, Marwick (at the time) for a qualified audit. (I would be breaking the law, I guess by not getting a certified audit.) They told me $5K and it would take a couple of days.
A nice new young accountant showed up at the appropriate time, in his suit and shiny shoes. I took him outside to show him the bins with grain in them that we would have to enter and measure for the audit. He called the home office, and got the okay to buy boots, jeans, and work shirts for the job.
Came back the next day. He said he wanted to "see the books." I said, "which books? I have three sets." His jaw dropped. "Why do you have 3 sets of books?" Me: "Because the State requires it. I have to keep track of the grain that passes through my business by weight, by bushel, and by dollar value. And they basically never total out the same." Thought he was going to die on the spot.
Another call to the home office. 2 days to figure out what to do.
Anyway, along with measuring grain in cubic feet (and it wasn't easy nor real accurate measurements) then converting that to bushels, and inventorying a whole bunch of nuts, bolts, vet supplies, and such, it took him 2 weeks. But now, hypothetically, they were ready to do many of the other 600 such elevators and bill them accordingly.
Then. . . about a month later I got a call from them. Would I consider contracting with them for $100/day to help audit another small elevator about 50 miles away? Okay, but I want motel and meal expenses, too. Fine.
It seems the owner had a heart attack just as the audit started and died. And his filing system consisted of a bunch of bushel baskets with weight tickets, sales tickets, market orders, and so on, and no one could make head nor tails of them.
I spent 2 5-day weeks trying to figure out and explain a large number of pieces of paper were. It was interesting.
That made me smile, especially that last part. I've had a couple cases after I retired that were like that "hey would you mind coming back as a 1099 piece work for this particular niche situation", they pay well :)
"Libertarians...claw back power." As the US devolves into Caesar-like Executive Orders, whether from Obama, Biden (Obama?), or Trump, Congress continues to fail to "jealously guard" its powers. A Congress that debated regulations as opposed to delegating the job to bureaucrats (i.e., lawyers masquerading as experts) would be a Congress that passed many fewer regulations. That's one level of claw back.
More better, is for states to assert their powers. Which issues are states unable to address by themselves (e.g., national defense, diplomacy, maybe water rights, then, um, air pollution from a plant just west of a state line?). Texas has as many people as Australia, and the small states in the Northeast could coordinate to set-up their regional liberal utopia.
Best of all is for persons to reclaim their power to resist the promise of a free lunch. Net taxpayers (i.e., the top 20%) might sue for value. People could actually insist upon getting an education, including in civics. Non-corrupt people could brace themselves and run for office.
I like this but it's an awfully inauspicious moment to look to Congress. An overrepresentation of lawyers there too, but more especially - many of them, and especially the most attention-getting (thus powerful?) seem to be nutjobs and other varieties of America's beloved "individualists" that have been run out of their home towns in the guise of being elected to office.
Your last sentence is key. Something is rotten about the elevator of political talent.
We need an Amendment that says no lawyers can be elected to Congress nor as President, nor apponted to the top 2 levels of the bureaucracy. Reduce their role to advising.
Google tells me that 40% of the members of my pointlessly bicameral statehouse - are lawyers. I think it would be higher but there's a significant percentage of members that would not be able to score well enough on the regular SAT, let alone the LSAT.
Still, you'd think that ... well, here's a situation. More than thirty years ago, the legislators passed a bill raising no tax but granting the sales tax on sporting goods, to the state parks and wildlife department. (That was about 15 million people ago.)
Lawyers it must have been who wrote that.
I'm not in a position to say whether they deliberately wrote in a little solecism or error of some kind; but of course lawyers sound found one, whether it was deliberate or not.
So instead of the promised revenue stream, only 40% of the sales tax went to parks, and for the most part the statehouse took that out of what they begged for in the biennial budget cycle anyway. So it was essentially about as close to unfunded as something could be (and that something very popular with people, you have to make a reservation just to get into a number of the parks ...).
People didn't at first grasp this theft, but when they did they weren't happy about it. However it took another 20 years before an effort arose to remedy the situation (I mean, somebody liked it, right? It was a money grab for some other entity.) Then there was another grassroots effort (much like the first one all those years ago) at great private expense to campaign for it yet again. It was a popular idea - that was not the problem.
Finally the funding was restored, though of course land prices had gone up so much and so many park-worthy areas opportunities lost to development, especially in those "areas near population centers" that park planners generally pay homage to, now, that it was in a way too late.
Still there it is. Lawyers making law, badly, and creating a problem which presumably it took more lawyers to make right, to make the legislation "airtight" and not a lawyer's little joke.
I just don't see the value of them. The public will cynically overridden because lawyers are either too clever or not quite as smart as they think. It doesn't really matter which.
Amen, this is something I was just talking with my kids about recently. And I remember once, I'm not of its accuracy, reading somewhere that it's primarily US problem to and most nations politicians aren't lawyers nor former. It should also be expanded down to municipal level and likewise you can't be a judge either. Judges under no circumstances should be allowed to have ever been a lawyer.
That all said, as uniformly as surveys show Americans hate lawyers, they keep voting for them and I don't get it. I remember a pollster asked me why I wasn't voting for Harris since I wasn't voting for Trump either and I simply said "oh that's easy, she's one of the most despicable people in America, a lawyer" and they were taken aback. I mean that's literally the most important criteria yet one people don't seem to talk about. Just quit rewarding and voting for lawyers, regardless of political stance or party, you already know they are horrible people. Likewise former police, judges, doctors, etc. If you were a good doctor, you'd still be doctoring or enjoying your retirement, not running for Congress at 43.
Congress deserves massive scorn on budget, and surely some scorn on handing power on regulatory issues over to the Executive branch.
But for the rest of your comments, there's this thing called the filibuster that makes major changes to anything but the budget nigh on impossible without bipartisan support.
Which is net a good thing, that unlike in other countries neither side can ram through massive changes with only slim majorities..
The last time one part controlled 60 votes in the Senate, we got Obamacare and Dodd-Frank.
And then the 60 votes were gone. If not never to return, then very unlikely for a fairly long while.
This comment is NOT on the topic under discussion. I was waiting for a response from you, Dr. Kling, on the incomparable Prof. Ed Leamer -- who passed away recently (two days back?) I have read your essay on Prof. Leamer, where you argue that Ed Leamer deserves the Nobel Prize for having taken the Con out of Econometrics -- for "Specification Searches" and his articles on applied econometrics. Please do write about him, an offbeat economist who always danced to a different drummer.
I'm not so much a conservative. But this strikes me as a bit like rolling a patient into the ER with a bleeding gunshot wound to the head and having the staff stand around and fret over which neuroscientist they'll need to recruit, hire, and fly in to do the surgery. Sure, hire the neuroscientist (or the Chief Auditor). But this is triage. Stop the bleeding. Save the patient. // I'm consistently struck by how Burkeans are always so willing to *conserve* the progressive status quo in the name of conservatism.
One who appreciates the work of Edmund Burke, who, quite justifiably, was against rapid, revolutionary change. I think he objected to the French Revolution in particular. Jeffersonians like me are more comfortable with such change if things get bad enough. Otherwise, you're conserving the traditions and policies set by the enemies of human freedom.
Connor Cruise O'Brien's "The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke" was oohed and aahed over when it came out. O'Brien writes well but it is very long.
You seem to assume that because an agency is technically independent it is more likely to resist the agenda of a left-wing administration. This has not been true in practice. The independent agencies were fully on-board with the Biden Administration policies. The reason is that (1) agencies naturally have an expansive, aggressive view of their jurisdiction and mission, which typically aligns with the left-wing agenda (see, e.g., Liz Warren's CFPB), and (2) the agency's employees typically believe in a large, aggressive federal government, and most of them are Democrats.
The courts, with their insulation from (formal) public and political accountability, are the model upon which independent agencies are based. And adjudicating ordinary cases in a neutral and professional manner according to clear and well-established law is basically nothing special and a routine skilled bureaucratic function, which is how it's seen in other countries, and indeed how things operate with the small armies of executive branch administrative judges. The problem is that the insulation combined with vast authority and acculturated solemn obedience creates ample opportunity for mischief and abuse of power and abuse of discretion in the furtherance of partisan favoritism and political activism. And you know, once the jurisprudential norm floodgates opened wide about a hundred years ago, the part of the institutions legitimacy based on trust to avoid political activism and self-police has collapsed to zero. Politics able to hide behind the cover of not being politics is how we got into this mess.
That collapse in trust SHOULD have also occurred to all these independent agencies in proper relation to their collapse in trustworthiness. It does no good to the right to pay lip service to a one-sided pretense. That the agencies are effectively political actors in a way that cannot be remedied and that their political character should be openly admitted and formalized is without doubt a positive step.
"And adjudicating ordinary cases in a neutral and professional manner according to clear and well-established law is basically nothing special"
It is in America, I'm pushing sixty and I've yet to see, much less hear, of US courts doing that in my time on this earth and I've spent more than my fair share of time in courtrooms. What judges care about is moving their schedule and denying good faith due process to get reelected / reappointed. Remember MOST judges are state and municipal, not lifetime, and are trial level.
Yes, I am well aware of how it goes in the US and how far things have fallen, which is absurd and an international aberration. That's why the US system had to hand- waive away unconstitutional irregularities such as non-Article-III narrow-authority specialist "judges" (i.e. "actually just mere bureaucrats") in order to have any hope of handling the caseload crisis of special subject matter adjudications.
Ah my bad, I read your "and" as a separate clause, i.e. "The US judicial system does it great (just like the rest of the world), the agencies that attempted to implement their operational model failed (unlike the rest of the world)" as opposed to the way you re-said it; we are on the same sheet then.
I feel a good step in moving this all forward would be adopting New Zealand's recent law change that makes it a constitutional right for a citizen to receive, and expect, bureaucrats to be polite, efficient, and act in good faith at ALL levels. Imagine if you had a tort against the judge for failing to show up to court on time or the DMV for standing in line too long because the two bureaucrats issuing vehicle registrations are busy loudly arguing with each other about last night's reality TV episode (literally just happened to me Tuesday).
I agree the centralization of everything is a double-edged sword. But, in this case, at least they get control. In the past, they could win elections and still not have control.
Where cons should really be careful is around judicial independence. Historically (and structurally), the counter-majoritarian role of courts favors cons (for the most part).
I don't know enough about this to argue, but to this conservative, the courts and the legal profession have more often been our undoing. I saw on the unbidden Microsoft window of headlines that just popped up that Roberts has "paused" the court order to the Trump administration to release $2 billion of foreign aid by midnight.
It is difficult for me to imagine a John Roberts who does not believe that money is owed in perpetuity. But maybe he can be swayed by fashion too; I'd be amazed if so.
I'd be interested if you or anyone has legal insight into this. It's not something we've ever really had to think about before, so novel is it.
Well, if Kamala's Dept or Labor issued a directive to make all bathrooms unisex, with tampons for all, wouldn't you want a district judge to have the power to stop it, if only for a moment?
Name the Democrat President elected since 1900 who faced 1/10th of the resistance from the Federal bureaucracy that any Republican President has faced.
I don't think your fears of stronger presidential control are well founded in light of the underlying long term process of bureaucrats gaming the system.
Every agency starts out with oversight and sheds it over time. The best that can be done is to do what we're doing now, and systematically cut it down. I have little doubt it'll need to be done again at some point in the future though.
The actual text of the Trump EO on independent agency accountability is well worth a read: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensuring-accountability-for-all-agencies/ Its hard for me to see how the requirements put in place there are somehow going to spring back and prevent some independent agency from performing a statutory function that the Republicans would wind up regretting.
“Eternal vigilance” was supposedly being provided by the inspectors general, the Government Accountability Office, the Performance Improvement Council, the Evaluation Council, the Government Performance and Results Act, the budget process, the oversight committees, etc. etc. Searching GovInfo for “accountability” turns up 219,969 hits: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/search/%7B%22query%22%3A%22accountability%22%2C%22offset%22%3A0%7D
And like Diogenes searching for an honest man, Musk appears to be fruitlessly searching for an accountable federal program. DC is nothing more or less than Dr. Seuss’s town of Hawtch-Hawtch:
“Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch. Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see. So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn't work any harder n ot mawtch. So then somebody said "Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!". Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee. You're not a Hawtch-Watcher you're lucky you see!”
― Dr. Seuss, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?
Exaggeration? Read this new Department of Justice press release about a simple dog fighting bust:
“The USDA-OIG; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; Pasco County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office and the Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Police Department investigated the case. Assistance was provided by the U.S. Marshals Service, Massachusetts State Police, New Hampshire State Police, Animal Rescue League of Boston’s Law Enforcement Division, U.S. Coast Guard Investigative Service, Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Senior Trial Attorney Matthew T. Morris of the Environment and Natural Resources Division’s Environmental Crimes Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Erin Favorit and Tiffany Fields for the Middle District of Florida prosecuted the case. Trial Attorney Caitlyn Cook of the Environment and Natural Resources Division’s Wildlife and Marine Resources Section assisted with the transfer of the seized dogs to new owners. “
The USDA-OIG will of course trumpet their participation in their output reports and continued participation in such matters will justify all kinds of law enforcement special pays for the IG staff. Nothing is more corrupt in DC than an IG’s office.
But Musk might as well be temporary because Congress is the sole power capable of ending the grift. Unfortunately, the members of Congress appear wholly incapable of repealing a law not matter how pointless or absurd. As an experiment, just use an online random generator (for example https://www.justintools.com/numbers/random-numbers-within-range.php ) to pick a two digit number between 10 and 54 and another between 1000 and 2000. Then plug that into the United States Code online (https://uscode.house.gov/ ). Chances are you will get an outdated or pointless provision of law that serves no useful purpose to man or beast. I did one this morning and got 16 U.S.C. 1213:
Ҥ1213. Authorization of appropriations
For the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this chapter, there is authorized to be appropriated for the period commencing on September 26, 1970, and ending June 30, 1975, not to exceed $4,500,000.
The only thing that is going to prevent in the next decade the residents of the United States from winding up like the Uyghurs in China is if at every opportunity each and everyone gets in our representative’s face and shout “Afuera! Afuera! Afuera!” until it starts to sink into their thick skulls that the people of this country want all the statutory slop and regulatory waste in DC plucked out by the roots legislatively once and for all.
I think the right answer is to return to the Constitution, which established a federation of sovereign states. With a true federation of states, instead of a huge, powerful, top-down federal federal government, which is what we have today riding rough-shod over the Constitution, we would have the greatest separation of power and checks and balances imaginable.
1913 was a very bad year for the political economy of the USA.
"Loss of independence for the agencies will be good for conservatives only until the next time the left wins a Presidential election."
This statement might have been true as recently as 17 years ago.
But these agencies almost without exception are ALREADY in the hands of leftists, so it is almost impossible to imagine how a new system where they are only in the hands of leftists about half the time would be worse than the status quo.
"And what if Presidential control over the bureaucracy were feasible? The Presidency would become a frightening power center."
I usually agree with Arnold, and even where I disagree it almost never is the result of sloppy thinking, but on this point he seems just wrong.
All of us who lean Arnold agree there is too much power in Washington and it should be rolled back.
Probably all of us agree that Congress has given away too much if its power to the Executive branch, and Congress should take it back, or SCOTUS should force them to.
But the idea that THE PRESIDENT shouldn't have complete control of the Executive branch is just foolish.
Because it means you are saying that the inmates should run the asylum.
The American people who voted for Trump know better than the chattering class trying to defend the bureaucracy that this is wrong. The events of the last 16 years under Democrat presidents - and even under Trump 45 - demonstrate this clearly.
Having a COO who reports to the Executive is a distinction without a difference. Sure, it's unwise to have a President who is a micro-manager. But that's an almost completely different point.
Arnold writes "The approach that I recommended... is to have a Chief Operating Officer to oversee the agencies [and] a powerful Chief Auditor. This would serve as a check on the power of the COO and the agencies."
We already have auditors - the General Accountability Office (GAO), which used to be called the General Accounting Office and is a beast of Congress, and Inspectors General, although Trump fired dozens of the latter group. I should think someone like Musk (but not Musk) would need to be the COO. Perhaps that could be the role of the Vice President who generally has more bandwidth for such activity than the President and has the advantage of being an elected official.
I am not sure that the agencies' goal is self perpetuation so much as money laundering. I used to believe it was, but after seeing the levels of graft and spend the past two months, I am reevaluating my beliefs. If agencies were being wasteful and spending on themselves directly (lavish offices, junkets, bloated wages, etc.) I would expect perpetuation was their goal. Instead it looks like there is a phenomenal amount of money going out to political supporters, to the extent that it is starting to look like most of what they do is come up with ways to funnel money from the federal government's coffers to their friends and supporters.
That may be a bit of a distinction without a difference, but I also suspect that money goes largely to one set of friends and supporters, probably oh 90-99% of it based on the voting patterns of the greater DC area. That suggests to me that anything that cuts down the bureaucracy is a net win for the right, because the bureaucracy is going to support the left no matter what. It may have taken 80+ years for the right to really grasp that fact.
It's not really accurate to try to model "the agencies" or to personify these organizations and describe the various behaviors as arising out of clear motives.
What's more accurate is to picture it like an episode of The Sopranos when the small business owner has been set up as a mark for blackmail or to accumulate huge gambling debts or whatever, and the mafia basically takes a controlling interest. Now on the one hand, you have the actual profitable business, ordinary employees and managers just doing their job, serving real customers and providing good value honestly, paying taxes, and spending money on contracts with suppliers in a way that is totally normal, legitimate, justified, above-board, etc.
But to THE MAFIA which had secretly taken control of the enterprise in a way invisible to customers, employees, shareholders, etc. the business is more than just a money maker as they levy their own "taxes" on the profits. To be sure, the smart mafia understands it wants to keep the goose that lays the golden eggs alive indefinitely and should resist bleeding it too dry too fast which could end the party prematurely by drawing unwanted attention or killing the enterprise prematurely.
But still, they aren't going to stop at mere "taxes" / protection money, etc. Because, being a legitimate business, the cover story of the ordinary operations, and the legal structure and financial authorities of the organization, create all kinds of juicy opportunities for so much more, like embezzlement, money laundering, tax evasion, corruption, spoils-system-like favor-paying and fake employment for friends and family, diversion of "union dues" and frauds public and private of infinite variety. Which, duh, the mafia is not doing to be scrupulous and resist those temptations out of a commitment to common virtue and dedication to the public good, but of course they are going to exploit each and every one of those opportunities to the maximum extent they think they can get away with with, to include trying to make all those activities as hard to uncover and prosecute and look as technically legally defensible as possible. Yes, even claim to be morally defensible, and in some circumstances they even have a point - consider the famous opening scene from The Godfather in which the mortician's appeal to Don Corleone is specially for the justice the system has failed to provide.
Now, if you look at the organization from the outside, it seems like an ordinary small successful and honest business run by good workers. If you look at the books with forensic accountant, you see a shell that is a veil covering for a nasty mafia operation. Which is it? It's both, it's a hybrid, it's a kind of symbiosis, but with a firewall keeping the legitimate side of things ignorant from what is really happening on the other side.
THAT'S what started happening to the agencies, eventually to all of them, eventually as far as things could be taken.
The question of course is when, having discovered a beloved home is infested with termites in this way, weather one should even bother with trying to kill just the termites and replace only the damaged beams to try to preserve the worthy structure, or whether things have gone too far for salvage, and, while tragic and cruel, there's still no better alternative to burning it all down and starting over.
Your comment assumes that the agencies have a legitimate purpose that produces value. For some that is probably true, and for others it seems to be just a function of money laundering, with any positive outcomes merely incidental.
In your model, it matters whether an institution is 5% mafia or 95% mafia, after all. 100% is still on the table, however.
Beyond a few anecdotes, what is your evidence that anything close to 90% goes to friends and supporters?
90% of what? Certainly not of the entire federal budget. Of descetionary spending that includes all employee salaries? What from the farm bill(s) and weapons contracts is part of the 90%?
90% of the money being misappropriated via money laundering is going to friends and supporters of Democrats is the claim. That paragraph makes no attempts to guess the ratio of total spend that is legitimately towards the proper goals of the organization vs other illegitimate spend.
I call bullshit on less than 10% going to friends of Republicans.
And you seem to miss that these agencies are all headed by political appointees at a much lower level than Secretaries. They have immense power to control what bureaucrats do and don't do. What they lack is the ability to change Congressional legislation.
I would bet 90-99% if what you don't like under a Democrat President is controlled by his appointees, not civil service bureaucrats. I think your blame is misplaced.
I made my argument. Take it or not. Maybe we will find that under Bush USAID was funneling all its money to NGO's run by Republicans. I wouldn't bet on it, but Old Mitch has been in government so long for a reason.
You are losing the last shreds of respect I have of you. You're comments are as blindly biased as many liberals I know. You are worried about under story trees (USAID) when there are redwoods and sequoias out there (DOD). And those are more likely to favor friends of GOP (or local Congressional interests of either party).
Ever hear of Haliburton? Geez.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/halliburton-whistleblower-on-exposing-7-billion-no-bid-defense-contract-2019-06-30/
Rest assured, I have no shreds of respect for you.
Excellent point!
My concern about this "accountability first and foremost" approach is that it seems impossible for everyone with power to be accountable. On this auditor model, it doesn't seem like the chief auditor will be accountable. Unless they're accountable to the president, but then you are back to the same problem Arnold is talking about of too much power consolidated in the presidency.
I am also troubled by the problems of the bureaucracy. But one nice feature of the status quo is that the unaccountable civil servants don't individually have much power.
Collectively they do have a lot of power though. The problem seems to be worst when they are all aligned with the same ideology. An ideologically diverse, individually weak and unaccountable civil service might be the best of all possible worlds... But how do you get there from here?
Transparency provides a type of accountability that is all its own. Notice that many of these announcements had to be uncovered because they had been covered up in the first place.
The problem with transparency is that the public is too stupid and biased on average to tell what is a real scandal and what is smoke without fire.
I do favor transparency because I believe the people have a right to know, but I've let go of the fantasy that they will use that right wisely.
Of course, but it's not about the public. Even the elite pros with the best FOIA-Foo possible were basically unable to deal with the latest escalations and innovations in the fraud-laundering arms race.
Say more about what you're referring to?
There is no Auditor empowered to investigate any aspect of the government without redactions today
They also tend to be uninterested, because "It's too had to follow." Even at the local level where I taught budgeting.
"They" don't have to. All it needs is a very small subset exploring and reporting.
In what sense does that small subset provide a reliable check against wrongdoing, when the public doesn't have the good judgment to listen to the subsets that get to the truth?
Some sunshine is better disinfectant than none. Look at how much dirt DOGE has stirred up. That's not nothing.
What dirt? All I've heard are anecdotes of tiny scale compared to that agency's spending.
"...but then you are back to the same problem Arnold is talking about of too much power consolidated in the presidency."
I usually agree with Arnold, but on this point he seems just wrong.
All of us who lean Arnold agree there is too much power in Washington and it should be rolled back.
Probably all of us agree that Congress has given away too much of its power to the Executive branch, and Congress should take it back, or SCOTUS should force them to.
But the idea that THE PRESIDENT shouldn't have complete control of the Executive branch is just foolish.
Because it means you are saying that the inmates should run the asylum.
The American people who voted for Trump know better than the chattering class trying to defend the bureaucracy that this is wrong. The events of the last 16 years under Democrat presidents - and even under Trump 45 - demonstrate this clearly.
Part of Congress' power is to say how much can be spent and how much must be spent. It seems the later is what DOGE is trying to take for executive power. It isn't theirs to take.
And yet Biden and Obama each chose not to spend money that had been allocated. So unlike what the press indicated, Trump is hardly unique in that.
Biden not spending money allocated to building the wall, e.g. Check out Proclamation 10142
Separately, Congress has some years now given the executive branch some discretion on exactly where to spend said money in broad categories. So DOGE is now uncovering specifics that are shocking many of us, while not surprising some.
Check your sources.
I've been retired 6 years now. When I retired I'm pretty sure USACE (corps of engineers) was the only agency that had Congressional authority to reallocate funds. And they still had to spend it all.
Certainly most agencies DO NOT have that authority.
Sorry, but you are simply wrong on both counts.
In fact Congress now frequently grants agencies discretion over exactly where the money goes within categories.
But re whether or not Congress allocates each dollar to each external group, you don’t need to trust me, go look it up yourself.
As to whether presidents MUST spend every dollar Congress authorizes, go check that out yourself too. Again, Trump is NOT the first here by any means, despite what the press would have you believe.
From a very simple ChatGPT query:
“The Constitution grants Congress the power of the purse under Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, which states that ‘No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.'
However, the Constitution does not explicitly require the executive branch to spend all money that Congress authorizes. This has led to disputes over whether the president has the discretion to impound (withhold) funds appropriated by Congress.”
https://chatgpt.com/share/67c1dd80-5a24-8005-b107-102c32da267f
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 supposedly forces the President to spend all dollars Congress authorizes, but there is a good chance it will not stand up to constitutional challenge.
And despite it, both Obama and Biden fought spending allocated money.
But again, don’t trust me - or ChatGPT - go look it up yourself.
Within categories? Sure. Within the category the legislation Congress says the money is for, agencies can move. They can't move it to something DIFFERENT than what Congress says it is for ...except USACE.
Lol. Not consitutional. Very little is constitutional, certainly not to that specificity. It has a very short document.
Legislation was passed during or shortly after Nixon because he didn't spend on some things he didn't like. It is a legal requirement, if Congress says it is to be spent, as opposed to saying it CAN BE spent, which they rarely do.
Biden and Obama fought WITH Congress for approval not to spend. They didn't do it unilaterally
As I've always brought up anytime Arnold pushes his COO / CAO model is it will fail for exactly that reason. We already have that model, it's called OSC and the IGs and both are the equivalent of municipal police department internal affairs, police review boards, the bar, medical review boards, appellate court, etc they in practice exist solely to whitewash, legitimatize, and protect those they are supposed to be doing oversight of.
The CAO quickly becomes the modern equiv of an elected state AG, simply a mandatory stepping stone to higher office to be overtly abused to maximize that future political run. It's the incentive problem and neither a COO/COA will fix that.
If you want to fix the problem, you simply need to make individual bureaucrats liable, i.e. if you can prove waste, the bureaucrat is personally on the hook for paying it non dischargable in bankruptcy. If a defendant is found not guilty, the prosecutor is debarred and permanently so. If a person isn't charged, the arresting cop has to pay that person $1000 per day of incarceration non dischargable. If appellate court overrules a judge that judge gets 25% the damages on himself whether that is money (civil) or prison (criminal).
There simply is no skin on the game for bureaucrats, that's fundamentally the problem and it's not "accountability" as must use it (i.e. elections or fired), it needs to be the same level accountability you and I have, i.e. civil, criminal, negligence standards, etc
This sounds a bit like that planet from Star Trek TNG where the penalty for trampling the flowers was death
We already have that de facto in the US. The problem in that ST:TNG episode is you know that didn't apply to the government official trampling that flower to arrest you.
The problem isn't these things don't exist, they already do, just for me and you, not bureaucrats which are insolated from any meaningful oversight or consequences.
I think one thing is that a new Chief Auditor must replace the old one at least every 5 years. And to the extent possible, the ne Chief Auditor should be an opponent of the old one AND responsible for anything he misses that the old one got wrong.
Smart businesses and local governments change auditing firms at least every 5 years, and stuff still gets missed (Dixon, IL), but it improves your chances.
Smart businesses and governments don't and I say that as a former regulatory auditor. The organizational point of a formal audit is to pass, you pass those by giving repeat business to external auditors who are fully aware who butters their bread.
LOL. Perhaps I should have phrased it differently.
And of course not even changing auditors helps every time. There is a fair bit of incestuousness going on, for sure.
You may enjoy this story, though.
Decades ago (mid-1980s) the State of Illinois suddenly decide that all the "small grain elevator" (less than 1M bushel storage) had to get a certified audit. First problem, none of them had ever had even a qualified audit, and a large majority had never had any kind of audit at all.
So. I owned such an elevator at the time. My year ended May 30 (for practical reasons), and I contacted Peat, Marwick (at the time) for a qualified audit. (I would be breaking the law, I guess by not getting a certified audit.) They told me $5K and it would take a couple of days.
A nice new young accountant showed up at the appropriate time, in his suit and shiny shoes. I took him outside to show him the bins with grain in them that we would have to enter and measure for the audit. He called the home office, and got the okay to buy boots, jeans, and work shirts for the job.
Came back the next day. He said he wanted to "see the books." I said, "which books? I have three sets." His jaw dropped. "Why do you have 3 sets of books?" Me: "Because the State requires it. I have to keep track of the grain that passes through my business by weight, by bushel, and by dollar value. And they basically never total out the same." Thought he was going to die on the spot.
Another call to the home office. 2 days to figure out what to do.
Anyway, along with measuring grain in cubic feet (and it wasn't easy nor real accurate measurements) then converting that to bushels, and inventorying a whole bunch of nuts, bolts, vet supplies, and such, it took him 2 weeks. But now, hypothetically, they were ready to do many of the other 600 such elevators and bill them accordingly.
Then. . . about a month later I got a call from them. Would I consider contracting with them for $100/day to help audit another small elevator about 50 miles away? Okay, but I want motel and meal expenses, too. Fine.
It seems the owner had a heart attack just as the audit started and died. And his filing system consisted of a bunch of bushel baskets with weight tickets, sales tickets, market orders, and so on, and no one could make head nor tails of them.
I spent 2 5-day weeks trying to figure out and explain a large number of pieces of paper were. It was interesting.
That made me smile, especially that last part. I've had a couple cases after I retired that were like that "hey would you mind coming back as a 1099 piece work for this particular niche situation", they pay well :)
"Libertarians...claw back power." As the US devolves into Caesar-like Executive Orders, whether from Obama, Biden (Obama?), or Trump, Congress continues to fail to "jealously guard" its powers. A Congress that debated regulations as opposed to delegating the job to bureaucrats (i.e., lawyers masquerading as experts) would be a Congress that passed many fewer regulations. That's one level of claw back.
More better, is for states to assert their powers. Which issues are states unable to address by themselves (e.g., national defense, diplomacy, maybe water rights, then, um, air pollution from a plant just west of a state line?). Texas has as many people as Australia, and the small states in the Northeast could coordinate to set-up their regional liberal utopia.
Best of all is for persons to reclaim their power to resist the promise of a free lunch. Net taxpayers (i.e., the top 20%) might sue for value. People could actually insist upon getting an education, including in civics. Non-corrupt people could brace themselves and run for office.
I like this but it's an awfully inauspicious moment to look to Congress. An overrepresentation of lawyers there too, but more especially - many of them, and especially the most attention-getting (thus powerful?) seem to be nutjobs and other varieties of America's beloved "individualists" that have been run out of their home towns in the guise of being elected to office.
Your last sentence is key. Something is rotten about the elevator of political talent.
We need an Amendment that says no lawyers can be elected to Congress nor as President, nor apponted to the top 2 levels of the bureaucracy. Reduce their role to advising.
Google tells me that 40% of the members of my pointlessly bicameral statehouse - are lawyers. I think it would be higher but there's a significant percentage of members that would not be able to score well enough on the regular SAT, let alone the LSAT.
Still, you'd think that ... well, here's a situation. More than thirty years ago, the legislators passed a bill raising no tax but granting the sales tax on sporting goods, to the state parks and wildlife department. (That was about 15 million people ago.)
Lawyers it must have been who wrote that.
I'm not in a position to say whether they deliberately wrote in a little solecism or error of some kind; but of course lawyers sound found one, whether it was deliberate or not.
So instead of the promised revenue stream, only 40% of the sales tax went to parks, and for the most part the statehouse took that out of what they begged for in the biennial budget cycle anyway. So it was essentially about as close to unfunded as something could be (and that something very popular with people, you have to make a reservation just to get into a number of the parks ...).
People didn't at first grasp this theft, but when they did they weren't happy about it. However it took another 20 years before an effort arose to remedy the situation (I mean, somebody liked it, right? It was a money grab for some other entity.) Then there was another grassroots effort (much like the first one all those years ago) at great private expense to campaign for it yet again. It was a popular idea - that was not the problem.
Finally the funding was restored, though of course land prices had gone up so much and so many park-worthy areas opportunities lost to development, especially in those "areas near population centers" that park planners generally pay homage to, now, that it was in a way too late.
Still there it is. Lawyers making law, badly, and creating a problem which presumably it took more lawyers to make right, to make the legislation "airtight" and not a lawyer's little joke.
I just don't see the value of them. The public will cynically overridden because lawyers are either too clever or not quite as smart as they think. It doesn't really matter which.
Amen, this is something I was just talking with my kids about recently. And I remember once, I'm not of its accuracy, reading somewhere that it's primarily US problem to and most nations politicians aren't lawyers nor former. It should also be expanded down to municipal level and likewise you can't be a judge either. Judges under no circumstances should be allowed to have ever been a lawyer.
That all said, as uniformly as surveys show Americans hate lawyers, they keep voting for them and I don't get it. I remember a pollster asked me why I wasn't voting for Harris since I wasn't voting for Trump either and I simply said "oh that's easy, she's one of the most despicable people in America, a lawyer" and they were taken aback. I mean that's literally the most important criteria yet one people don't seem to talk about. Just quit rewarding and voting for lawyers, regardless of political stance or party, you already know they are horrible people. Likewise former police, judges, doctors, etc. If you were a good doctor, you'd still be doctoring or enjoying your retirement, not running for Congress at 43.
Congress deserves massive scorn on budget, and surely some scorn on handing power on regulatory issues over to the Executive branch.
But for the rest of your comments, there's this thing called the filibuster that makes major changes to anything but the budget nigh on impossible without bipartisan support.
Which is net a good thing, that unlike in other countries neither side can ram through massive changes with only slim majorities..
The last time one part controlled 60 votes in the Senate, we got Obamacare and Dodd-Frank.
And then the 60 votes were gone. If not never to return, then very unlikely for a fairly long while.
This comment is NOT on the topic under discussion. I was waiting for a response from you, Dr. Kling, on the incomparable Prof. Ed Leamer -- who passed away recently (two days back?) I have read your essay on Prof. Leamer, where you argue that Ed Leamer deserves the Nobel Prize for having taken the Con out of Econometrics -- for "Specification Searches" and his articles on applied econometrics. Please do write about him, an offbeat economist who always danced to a different drummer.
I'm not so much a conservative. But this strikes me as a bit like rolling a patient into the ER with a bleeding gunshot wound to the head and having the staff stand around and fret over which neuroscientist they'll need to recruit, hire, and fly in to do the surgery. Sure, hire the neuroscientist (or the Chief Auditor). But this is triage. Stop the bleeding. Save the patient. // I'm consistently struck by how Burkeans are always so willing to *conserve* the progressive status quo in the name of conservatism.
I need to figure out what a Burkean is. Who can explain?
One who appreciates the work of Edmund Burke, who, quite justifiably, was against rapid, revolutionary change. I think he objected to the French Revolution in particular. Jeffersonians like me are more comfortable with such change if things get bad enough. Otherwise, you're conserving the traditions and policies set by the enemies of human freedom.
Okay. Thanks for your perspective. I’ll read up on this and ponder it. Certainly it’s more complicated, but this is a good start.
Connor Cruise O'Brien's "The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke" was oohed and aahed over when it came out. O'Brien writes well but it is very long.
Good to know. I’ve picked up Levin’s book on Burke, but haven’t been able to get into it. I figure it might better better just to read Burke himself.
You seem to assume that because an agency is technically independent it is more likely to resist the agenda of a left-wing administration. This has not been true in practice. The independent agencies were fully on-board with the Biden Administration policies. The reason is that (1) agencies naturally have an expansive, aggressive view of their jurisdiction and mission, which typically aligns with the left-wing agenda (see, e.g., Liz Warren's CFPB), and (2) the agency's employees typically believe in a large, aggressive federal government, and most of them are Democrats.
The courts, with their insulation from (formal) public and political accountability, are the model upon which independent agencies are based. And adjudicating ordinary cases in a neutral and professional manner according to clear and well-established law is basically nothing special and a routine skilled bureaucratic function, which is how it's seen in other countries, and indeed how things operate with the small armies of executive branch administrative judges. The problem is that the insulation combined with vast authority and acculturated solemn obedience creates ample opportunity for mischief and abuse of power and abuse of discretion in the furtherance of partisan favoritism and political activism. And you know, once the jurisprudential norm floodgates opened wide about a hundred years ago, the part of the institutions legitimacy based on trust to avoid political activism and self-police has collapsed to zero. Politics able to hide behind the cover of not being politics is how we got into this mess.
That collapse in trust SHOULD have also occurred to all these independent agencies in proper relation to their collapse in trustworthiness. It does no good to the right to pay lip service to a one-sided pretense. That the agencies are effectively political actors in a way that cannot be remedied and that their political character should be openly admitted and formalized is without doubt a positive step.
"And adjudicating ordinary cases in a neutral and professional manner according to clear and well-established law is basically nothing special"
It is in America, I'm pushing sixty and I've yet to see, much less hear, of US courts doing that in my time on this earth and I've spent more than my fair share of time in courtrooms. What judges care about is moving their schedule and denying good faith due process to get reelected / reappointed. Remember MOST judges are state and municipal, not lifetime, and are trial level.
Yes, I am well aware of how it goes in the US and how far things have fallen, which is absurd and an international aberration. That's why the US system had to hand- waive away unconstitutional irregularities such as non-Article-III narrow-authority specialist "judges" (i.e. "actually just mere bureaucrats") in order to have any hope of handling the caseload crisis of special subject matter adjudications.
Ah my bad, I read your "and" as a separate clause, i.e. "The US judicial system does it great (just like the rest of the world), the agencies that attempted to implement their operational model failed (unlike the rest of the world)" as opposed to the way you re-said it; we are on the same sheet then.
I feel a good step in moving this all forward would be adopting New Zealand's recent law change that makes it a constitutional right for a citizen to receive, and expect, bureaucrats to be polite, efficient, and act in good faith at ALL levels. Imagine if you had a tort against the judge for failing to show up to court on time or the DMV for standing in line too long because the two bureaucrats issuing vehicle registrations are busy loudly arguing with each other about last night's reality TV episode (literally just happened to me Tuesday).
I agree the centralization of everything is a double-edged sword. But, in this case, at least they get control. In the past, they could win elections and still not have control.
Where cons should really be careful is around judicial independence. Historically (and structurally), the counter-majoritarian role of courts favors cons (for the most part).
I don't know enough about this to argue, but to this conservative, the courts and the legal profession have more often been our undoing. I saw on the unbidden Microsoft window of headlines that just popped up that Roberts has "paused" the court order to the Trump administration to release $2 billion of foreign aid by midnight.
It is difficult for me to imagine a John Roberts who does not believe that money is owed in perpetuity. But maybe he can be swayed by fashion too; I'd be amazed if so.
I'd be interested if you or anyone has legal insight into this. It's not something we've ever really had to think about before, so novel is it.
on questions like these, I strongly suggesting Eugene Volokh as the axe.
https://reason.com/volokh/
Well, if Kamala's Dept or Labor issued a directive to make all bathrooms unisex, with tampons for all, wouldn't you want a district judge to have the power to stop it, if only for a moment?
Oh, sorry - I'm not at all interested in the pause, that's meaningless. I'm interested in the case, or the order rather.
To stop it in their district? Yes.
To stop it nationwide? Hell no.
No, it would be one of the few abuses of authority I'd celebrate, hopefully she would follow it up with coed jail and prison too.
Name the Democrat President elected since 1900 who faced 1/10th of the resistance from the Federal bureaucracy that any Republican President has faced.
I don't think your fears of stronger presidential control are well founded in light of the underlying long term process of bureaucrats gaming the system.
Every agency starts out with oversight and sheds it over time. The best that can be done is to do what we're doing now, and systematically cut it down. I have little doubt it'll need to be done again at some point in the future though.
The actual text of the Trump EO on independent agency accountability is well worth a read: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/ensuring-accountability-for-all-agencies/ Its hard for me to see how the requirements put in place there are somehow going to spring back and prevent some independent agency from performing a statutory function that the Republicans would wind up regretting.
“Eternal vigilance” was supposedly being provided by the inspectors general, the Government Accountability Office, the Performance Improvement Council, the Evaluation Council, the Government Performance and Results Act, the budget process, the oversight committees, etc. etc. Searching GovInfo for “accountability” turns up 219,969 hits: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/search/%7B%22query%22%3A%22accountability%22%2C%22offset%22%3A0%7D
And like Diogenes searching for an honest man, Musk appears to be fruitlessly searching for an accountable federal program. DC is nothing more or less than Dr. Seuss’s town of Hawtch-Hawtch:
“Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch. Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see. So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn't work any harder n ot mawtch. So then somebody said "Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!". Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee. You're not a Hawtch-Watcher you're lucky you see!”
― Dr. Seuss, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?
Exaggeration? Read this new Department of Justice press release about a simple dog fighting bust:
“The USDA-OIG; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; Pasco County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office and the Fitchburg (Massachusetts) Police Department investigated the case. Assistance was provided by the U.S. Marshals Service, Massachusetts State Police, New Hampshire State Police, Animal Rescue League of Boston’s Law Enforcement Division, U.S. Coast Guard Investigative Service, Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Senior Trial Attorney Matthew T. Morris of the Environment and Natural Resources Division’s Environmental Crimes Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Erin Favorit and Tiffany Fields for the Middle District of Florida prosecuted the case. Trial Attorney Caitlyn Cook of the Environment and Natural Resources Division’s Wildlife and Marine Resources Section assisted with the transfer of the seized dogs to new owners. “
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/florida-man-sentenced-dog-fighting
The USDA-OIG will of course trumpet their participation in their output reports and continued participation in such matters will justify all kinds of law enforcement special pays for the IG staff. Nothing is more corrupt in DC than an IG’s office.
But Musk might as well be temporary because Congress is the sole power capable of ending the grift. Unfortunately, the members of Congress appear wholly incapable of repealing a law not matter how pointless or absurd. As an experiment, just use an online random generator (for example https://www.justintools.com/numbers/random-numbers-within-range.php ) to pick a two digit number between 10 and 54 and another between 1000 and 2000. Then plug that into the United States Code online (https://uscode.house.gov/ ). Chances are you will get an outdated or pointless provision of law that serves no useful purpose to man or beast. I did one this morning and got 16 U.S.C. 1213:
Ҥ1213. Authorization of appropriations
For the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this chapter, there is authorized to be appropriated for the period commencing on September 26, 1970, and ending June 30, 1975, not to exceed $4,500,000.
( Pub. L. 91–427, §3, Sept. 26, 1970, 84 Stat. 884 .)”
The only thing that is going to prevent in the next decade the residents of the United States from winding up like the Uyghurs in China is if at every opportunity each and everyone gets in our representative’s face and shout “Afuera! Afuera! Afuera!” until it starts to sink into their thick skulls that the people of this country want all the statutory slop and regulatory waste in DC plucked out by the roots legislatively once and for all.
I think the right answer is to return to the Constitution, which established a federation of sovereign states. With a true federation of states, instead of a huge, powerful, top-down federal federal government, which is what we have today riding rough-shod over the Constitution, we would have the greatest separation of power and checks and balances imaginable.
1913 was a very bad year for the political economy of the USA.
"Loss of independence for the agencies will be good for conservatives only until the next time the left wins a Presidential election."
This statement might have been true as recently as 17 years ago.
But these agencies almost without exception are ALREADY in the hands of leftists, so it is almost impossible to imagine how a new system where they are only in the hands of leftists about half the time would be worse than the status quo.
"And what if Presidential control over the bureaucracy were feasible? The Presidency would become a frightening power center."
I usually agree with Arnold, and even where I disagree it almost never is the result of sloppy thinking, but on this point he seems just wrong.
All of us who lean Arnold agree there is too much power in Washington and it should be rolled back.
Probably all of us agree that Congress has given away too much if its power to the Executive branch, and Congress should take it back, or SCOTUS should force them to.
But the idea that THE PRESIDENT shouldn't have complete control of the Executive branch is just foolish.
Because it means you are saying that the inmates should run the asylum.
The American people who voted for Trump know better than the chattering class trying to defend the bureaucracy that this is wrong. The events of the last 16 years under Democrat presidents - and even under Trump 45 - demonstrate this clearly.
Having a COO who reports to the Executive is a distinction without a difference. Sure, it's unwise to have a President who is a micro-manager. But that's an almost completely different point.
Agreed on Musk as Chief Auditor. Great description.
IMO only for the Fed can one make a reasonable case for its "independence" from the Executive Branch.
Arnold writes "The approach that I recommended... is to have a Chief Operating Officer to oversee the agencies [and] a powerful Chief Auditor. This would serve as a check on the power of the COO and the agencies."
We already have auditors - the General Accountability Office (GAO), which used to be called the General Accounting Office and is a beast of Congress, and Inspectors General, although Trump fired dozens of the latter group. I should think someone like Musk (but not Musk) would need to be the COO. Perhaps that could be the role of the Vice President who generally has more bandwidth for such activity than the President and has the advantage of being an elected official.