Ostensibly, this EO is meant to remove power from bureaucratically controlled agencies in the government. The right have been complaining that real power has been usurped from the institutions mentioned in the constitution, and centered in a professional managerial class, that works below the surface, and has no culpability or exposure to voters.
That's all massively up for debate obviously, but this EO seems to be aimed square at that "problem".
Those agencies were created by law and given a command by law to fulfill a role in the executive branch. The executive branch doesn't get to decide how to organize itself since that would make a mess when the next guy comes up, so laws are there to make sure the structure is kept in a _continuity of the state_, such that just because the head changes, not everything needs to change. You could argue all you want about that, but stability is a desire feature of the state. It not only helps citizens to be able to have long term planning, but also saves the resources by not needing to figure out how things work constantly.
Some amount of stability is desirable, but not an infinite amount. A certain amount of creative destruction is necessary to avoid regulatory/ideological/bureaucratic/oligarchic capture. A completely stable system will fall to the iron law of bureaucracy.
>A certain amount of creative destruction is necessary...
This sounds truthy and even casts instability as somehow heroic, but it's an oversimplification and hides similar fallacies. It also implies that instability for the sake of instability is default-positive.
The best way to avoid capture is via law / regulation. There should be term limits, campaign finance reform, more regulation against lobbyists and the revolving door, etc. We can't have Citizens United then wonder how capture happened. And, no amount of instability will address that.
In fact, instability in this environment can serve as cover for increased capture, as there is no bulwark against reassignment of winners. This is likely what we're seeing with Musk right now.
Stability here doesn't mean nothing changes. It means things change in an orderly, reasoned manner to include thoughtfully preventing capture.
> The best way to avoid capture is via law / regulation. There should be term limits, campaign finance reform, more regulation against lobbyists and the revolving door, etc. We can't have Citizens United then wonder how capture happened. And, no amount of instability will address that.
On the contrary. We tried to reform and improve the system through the normal channels for decades. We failed. The system is evidently already captured and something a little more radical is warranted.
>On the contrary. We tried to reform and improve the system through the normal channels for decades
Did we though? I don't remember the last time campaign finance reform was on the national ballot or lobbying regulation or term limits. People aren't even talking about it.
The problem is that the majority of the voting public is easily distracted and not clamoring for these things that can bring about constructive change.
But, that distraction is not random. The people who push for and benefit most from this distraction (and subsequent failure to change) happen to also do things like donate $250M+ to help buy a president, then convince followers that something "a little more radical" is needed to help seal the deal.
Oh, and they happen to also have billions in government contracts.
But, they are eliminating capture? If ever there was a fox guarding the henhouse. "The Onion" couldn't make this up.
Without agreeing or disagreeing with you, that's irrelevant. The law is the law. If it specifies that a particular agency must exist, and how it should function, then that's what the executive is required to implement.
In theory, at least. If Trump and his minions decide to do something else, there isn't really anyone with the power to stop him, absent impeachment.
I was replying to someone who said "You could argue all you want about that, but stability is a desire feature of the state. It not only helps citizens to be able to have long term planning, but also saves the resources by not needing to figure out how things work constantly."
Legal questions aside, I think that's an overly simplistic take; a certain amount of stability is desirable, but it's possible to be too stable as well as too unstable.
The stability here comes from not having to wonder what the next guy is going to do wrt taxes, etc. because those need to pass a process that would be public in congress. Stability doesn't mean staleness. It means that things don't change willy nilly.
Right, and that level of process allows a certain amount of capture and exploitation. E.g. companies will game the tax code in the confidence that they'll get plenty of warning before any loopholes are closed. It's hard to imagine the 2017 change to how corporate repatriated income is taxed happening under any other president, and that rule change not only collected a bunch of revenue from companies that had been engaging in tax avoidance schemes, but also burned them enough to deter that kind of gamesmanship, at least for a couple of years.
Right, on its face this is simply more of the "drain the swamp" rhetoric from his first term. The way the EO is written sounds "fine" to my high school civics ears: there's three branches of government, one is the executive branch, and ostensibly the president is the head of that branch.
The motivation of the EO was clearly articulated all throughout the campaign that, as you say, even within the executive branch there's a large swath of career bureaucrats who kind of do their own thing. And so if the people vote for something else, there's kind of a limit to what any new administration can actually accomplish. Arguably, this is by design and provides valuable stability, but I think you have to at least acknowledge that it's there, and people aren't crazy for noticing it and trying to change that if the career bureaucrats aren't actually on their side.
I thought Trump was laughably ineffective his first time around. I chalked it up to all the Russia Manchurian Candidate stuff and Trump's constant flailing and hiring and firing of staff. But I'm wondering now how much of it really was this large bureaucracy in the executive branch not really moving in step with the new administration, which is interesting to me. I think there was a JD Vance interview (maybe with Ross Douthat in NYTimes?) where he says people throw around "constitutional crisis" a lot, but that he felt we were already in one because Trump was asking the generals stuff about troops in Afghanistan and they weren't answering.
I know people here are primed to read the worst into everything, and there's some seriously apocalyptic predictions in this discussion. But my first impression is that the EO reads fairly mundanely and is meant to sound like it's addressing the "hostile bureaucracy" situation that folks on the right have been talking about for years. I guess we'll see in a couple years, how it all plays out. I wish people predicted stuff more and then looked back to calibrate themselves based on the results.
> The way the EO is written sounds "fine" to my high school civics ears: there's three branches of government, one is the executive branch, and ostensibly the president is the head of that branch.
Then maybe you need to get an understanding of human organizations in general and the US government in particular that goes beyond your high school civics days.
The president has no power or authority to interpret the law, not beyond the implicit power of every citizen to interpret the law for themsleves. The president has the power and authority to execute the law as written, mostly by appointing other people to do so in specific areas. The power to choose those specific people is already huge, directing their every move is neither needed nor desirable.
There are literally tens of thousands of laws, if not hundreds of thousands (when including regulations and binding court precedents) that need to be followed by the federal government. The president simply can't be an authority on all of them, it's not even remotely close to humanly possible.
Not to mention, very tight, military-style control is a a horrible feature. The President may get to command the army, but they are not commander-in-chief of the executive branch, civilian agencies don't and mustn't work that way. Government employees must uphold the law, and fulfill the role of their position. If they're not following the law, they should be fired, and a court may get involved to reach this conclusion. The president doesn't get to dictate what the law is and fire government employees who are upholding the law instead of the president's interpretation of the law.
My prediction was that Trump would abandon the Ukrainians and suck up to Putin, and as of today that's right on target. This calibration exercise is not reassuring at all.
You could ask "Is Putin more like Hitler or is Putin more like Ho Chi Minh?"
Putin does not try to hide the fact that he wants to restore the Russian empire and reconquer the former soviet bloc - a group of peoples who want nothing to do with him.
Ho Chi Minh wanted an independent Vietnam, got it, and never really expanded from there.
We either help the Ukranians stop Putin now or we fight a much bigger fight later. Hitler could have easily been stopped at the Rhineland, or at Czechoslovakia. But instead we got "Peace for our time".
That's all massively up for debate obviously, but this EO seems to be aimed square at that "problem".