The sentence is accurate, your comment is not. The administration unilaterally canceled existing grants and halted and showed granting of funds appropriated by Congress, so the money was not used as allocated. If Congress allocated $1B for medical research and the administration only releases funds for $500M, it’s ignoring the law.

For example, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2

As to “exercising control,” American science has been great because scientists judge which projects are the strongest. That’s being replaced by judgement by political appointees who are not experts: https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-pares-down-grant...

It tightened its hold by shrinking its portfolio as the article describes.

> That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).

Right, traditionally that’s how it worked. Elected officials set the broad parameters of grantmaking, but did not closely supervise individual grants, because we didn’t want scientific researchers to feel like pleasing politicians is their job. But Trump feels that everyone should please him at all times and enjoys punishing anyone who won’t.

The purpose of the system is to spend public money according to the priorities of the electorate. To the extent that the electorate trusts experts to set those priorities, it will vote for politicians that delegate a large amount of discretion to those experts. If the experts lose the confidence of the electorate, then a properly designed system will retract that discretion.

For the most part, the system that exists today actually reflects that design. The statute and associated regulations for the most part invest authority in "the Director." The Director can rely on committees of experts, etc., but it's more by convention.

> The purpose of the system is to spend public money according to the priorities of the electorate.

Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS. It cannot be the case that the electorate can just vote 50.00001% for a POTUS and the priorities of the 49.99999% get instantly vaporized. That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority. If POTUS gets to decide that because he won by the slimmest majority, he has has a mandate to unilaterally and immediately destroy everything the other side has ever done, then the American project is just over; it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in and actually does wage war on Right-leaning institutions the way the Right is waging war on left-leaning institutions.

> Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS.

We’re talking about discretionary grants, where Congress gave the executive branch a bunch of money and said to spend it with some broadly defined purpose. “Decide how to use this big block of money to advance health” falls pretty comfortably within the scope of “executing the law” rather than “making the law.”

> That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority.

The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.

> it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in

It’s not symmetric, because government employees and government-funded NGOs aren’t power centers for the right, especially the new right. Is President AOC going to lay off all the staff at PBS making programming promoting conservative values? Or cut all the federal grants to Heritage and Fed Soc?

I’d be thrilled if AOC openly ran on extreme promises like Trump did (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform) and then, if she won, started knocking them out. For one thing, I don’t think she could win by promising to open the borders, increase free trade, bring back racial preferences in small business loans, or put more power back in the hands of federal employees angling for jobs at companies they regulate. And if she runs and wins on something like breaking up big banks or raising taxes, then that’s fine.

More generally, I think a lot of our political dysfunction comes from the fact that, regardless of who wins the election, the government is run by the PMCs. No matter who you vote for, what you’ll actually get is managerial neoliberalism with a side of identity politics and mass immigration. Instead, Democrats should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win. Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.

> We’re talking about discretionary grants, where Congress gave the executive branch a bunch of money and said to spend it with some broadly defined purpose

Yeah, this is the hack that's being run right now. Indeed, the United States runs on norms to a large degree, and a small group of people have decided that if something isn't spelled out explicitly, that gives them untold unilateral power in the gray areas to do whatever they want because again, they've achieved a >50% margin in a single election, so therefore that makes them king for 4 years.

The norm that has worked out well for everyone for decades has been that we trust experts to run their own systems, because we understand that political interference from the government is suboptimal and leads to cronyism. Now, for some reason it's the conservatives who have a problem with this arrangement, and want to involve themselves to the point they are filtering by keywords what's allowed to be researched, big government at it's best.

So now, a system that took decades to build, which was the envy of the world in terms of research output, and which has been beneficial to US GDP and national security, is decimated in a few years time because a small group of people didn't like what they saw.

In this new Unitary Executive world, long-term research projects can only happen as long as Democrats have political control, because every time a Republican president comes into office they will shut down all research projects they don't like. I don't think it will work out well but we will see.

> The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.

But Congress cannot reliably affect a tyranny -- they're too fractious, they are reelected as a whole every 2 years, and their priorities are too local. Moreover, the minority actually has power in Congress, even if it's just power to block progress. This is why they are supposed to be invested with more power than the President.

> Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.

They did and they have (Project 2025) which is why we got torture prisons, rampant bribery and corruption, and a complete power / money grab from the Oval Office on down. I actually love that this is happening because we finally get to see the Conservative political project come to fruition. Finally we can stop pretending it was about "maintaining US institutions" and "preserving the soul of the nation". They are finally saying "we will go to war for the oil" instead of pretending it was about defending freedom and liberty. It's a nice change of pace.

But anyway, I don't agree this is something that should happen. What you're proposing will just going to lead to political instability as subsequent administrations flip back and forth. In feedback control systems we call that a "divergence" and it usually precedes total system collapse.

"The administration" is not a monolithic entity. For the last ~150 years, even though it's had political appointees at the top, the vast majority of its employees have been selected (at least ostensibly) on the basis of merit, not political loyalty. They're supposed to be somewhat insulated from the changing political winds. The layers of bureaucracy in between were created deliberately, to preserve some degree of decision-making independence.

When people talk about "the Trump administration tightening its hold", they mean Trump and his political appointees exerting direct control over things that have a strong precedent for being out of their direct control.

Using the word "administration" to conflate the presidency with the layers of organization below it is the main premise of the "unitary executive theory", which is an extremely recent development of the current Supreme Court. Previously, when Congress said "such-and-such a decision is supposed to be made by the staff of agency XYZ, not by the President/Secretary personally", the courts assumed they meant it.

This isn't new. My father told me 50 years ago, "never work for the government, because your job exists at the whims of whoever gets elected."

You're conflating two very different things. You're correct that civil service reforms sought to ensure employees would be hired based on merit. But that does not mean they were granted "decision-making independence." The point was to have highly qualified people executing the agenda of the elected President--not to allow them to exercise discretion independent of political forces.

In Federalist 70 Hamilton emphasizes that a key feature of the Constitution is "unity" of executive power in the President: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed70.asp. Hamilton explains that the Constitution expressly rejects a model that had been adopted by several state governments, where the exercise of executive power was subject to the independent check of the executive's subordinates:

> The ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers.

> That unity is conducive to energy will not be disputed. Decision, activity, secrecy, and despatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number; and in proportion as the number is increased, these qualities will be diminished.

> This unity may be destroyed in two ways: either by vesting the power in two or more magistrates of equal dignity and authority; or by vesting it ostensibly in one man, subject, in whole or in part, to the control and co-operation of others, in the capacity of counsellors to him.

So the view being espoused here is not a "recent development." Hamilton was explaining back in 1788 the problems with a model where the President was "ostensibly" the head of the administration, but was "subject, in whole or in part, to the control and cooperation" of his theoretical subordinates.

The constitution was understood this way from Hamilton until Myers v. United States in 1926--which held that the President could fire agency heads without Congressional approval because that was necessary to secure his authority to carry out his will as the executive. The Supreme Court only discarded the traditional view of the executive in the 1930s when FDR created the modern administrative state. And what's now labeled "unitary executive theory" is a legal movement that arose in the 1980s to restore the original view of how the executive worked. The new development wasn't the view of executive power, but instead the idea that we should try to restore how things worked prior to the 1930s.

> Yes "~150 years" ago (sounds right to me, not sure on the exact date), there was civil service reform. Prior to that every administration would fire the prior servants and install their own because every political party then and now wanted their own people to be of influence in civil service.

The purpose of civil service reform was to end patronage, not to insulate the civil service from political supervision. The idea was to have well-credentialed employees, instead of political donors, carrying out the policies of the elected President. It was not to have employees exercising power independently of the policies of the President.

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was enacted in 1883. Four decades later, former President Taft wrote Myers v. United States, which still reflected the conventional view that the President was actually in charge of the executive branch.

> What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.

If this were true, why did the number of the federal government employees stop growing in the 80s?

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...

> Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point

Well that's what I'm trying to understand. So you're making an argument from the perspective of the political landscape in the 70s and 80s, and you'd like to return us to a federal level 50 - 100 years ago.

Your argument might have been more persuasive in the 80s, but today it's clear that the government is actually vastly more efficient than it has been in the last 80 years, serving a larger population with fewer government employees; there are over 100M more people living in the USA as there were 40 years ago, yet government employment levels remain the same. Returning back to pre-1980s or even 1920s level of government would leave the USA completely at the mercy of corporations (which for some that's the whole point, so maybe that's a good thing from your perspective, but I wouldn't choose that outcome).

> So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group.

Can you name even a single time when two groups of civil servants sabotaged each other in this way? If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?

There was massive sabotage of the first Trump administration. We're talking about administration lawyers not reporting case developments to political employees in order to keep the political appointees in the dark.

Which activities specifically were sabotaged? Trump was, for example, famously able to implement what he called a "Muslim ban" - previous administration hires can't have been happy about that, yet I don't recall any stories about civil servants sabotaging the implementation of it.

My impression is that many of Trump's political appointees simply don't understand due process requirements, and interpret any legal obstacles to executing their will as sabotage by shadowy figures. You mention case developments, but as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.

> You mention case developments, but as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.

I think you are correct here, but it still leaves the open question whether the government's case is weak because it is weak on merits or because the people in charge of defending/executing/prosecuting the case intentionally made holes in it or botched it to make it weak. I won't claim either is the case, only point out either or a mixture of both is hypothetically possible and merely making your assertion true doesn't rule out the latter being true.

Again, this isn’t a hypothetical. The administration has recently been deploying political appointees to prosecute cases the career employees thought were too weak, and they’ve had little success at even securing indictments. The reason Trump and his supporters insist on dragging the discussion to hypotheticals is that all of the concrete things they feel have been “sabotaged” are either impossible or illegal.

You presented it as a non-concrete, without an example. I don't believe this makes you a Trump "supporter" as you put it. The example you gave preceding it was of a Muslim ban working.

I don't doubt you have concrete examples of cases failing on merits, but I am only meeting you on the arena you presented.

I do very much expect people will present to cases on either side they believe are failures based on merits and ones they believe officials intentionally (or even accidently) botched. It's quite possible both have been true, in various cases. I won't make such assertions myself either way in this thread, only note that even if hypothetically what you say is true (even in the concrete) it wouldn't prove the underlying claim.

> Trump was, for example, famously able to implement what he called a "Muslim ban" - previous administration hires can't have been happy about that, yet I don't recall any stories about civil servants sabotaging the implementation of it.

Trump had to fire Sally Yates who refused to defend it in court: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1/31/us-attorney-general.... There was no justification for her refusing to enforce the order. The legality of the order would be tested under rational basis review, which is extremely favorable to the government. And the case squarely implicated the President's authority over national security and the border. It wasn't a slam dunk for the government by any means, but it was way beyond the minimum "colorability" standard for the DOJ to make legal arguments to defend the order while complying with their ethical arguments.

> You mention case developments,

I mean not even updating political appointees about court rulings and such, hoping to keep the cases off the radars of the political appointees.

> as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.

The new administration has won quite a lot of cases. For example, with the funding cuts, the legal strategy was quite well developed. That's why you heard so much in the media about impoundment. Impoundment is what you start talking about when you have no argument that "the administration cannot make this specific cut." It's the argument that, "well, if the administration makes all these cuts, it's an impoundment problem because the administration needs to spend that money on something within the statutory scope." That's why many universities have settled with the administration. They know that, even if they can win on impoundment or something like that, they can't make the administration reinstate the grants to them specifically.

Similarly on affirmative action, the administration has pursued a strong strategy. The kind of affirmative action that was allowed in universities before SFFA was never permitted in employment. But lots of companies engaged in blatantly illegal conduct in adopting preferences or quotas for specific groups: https://www.cadwalader.com/quorum/index.php?nid=9&eid=35. Companies aren't even fighting the administration on this for the most part on that front.

The new administration certainly has had some losses. Part of that is that they're litigating like liberals--making aggressive arguments to push the boundaries of the law, knowing that it will lose a lot of cases. The other part is that the administration doesn't have "A" players in every position. For example on the tariffs, there were major weaknesses in the trial arguments.

>an you name even a single time when two groups of civil servants sabotaged each other in this way?

DOGE vs USAID

>If civil servants engage in this kind of sabotage, how has Trump been able to enact things that are both controversial and flagrantly unlawful without being sabotaged?

I mean they have, look at all the civil servants who were fired and then sued for their jobs back with the leverage of judges who were prior appointed by Democrat leaning politics. Trump's attempt to eliminate large portions of the civil service has failed pretty spectacularly.

DOGE were not "civil servants" in the slightest. And USAID tried to sabotage DOGE?? Your entire worldview is backwards. (Looking through your past posts and yiikes yeah)

Yes, it’s true that Trump specifically has instructed civil servants to sabotage each other. You know why this is a dishonest answer, so I don’t see the point of continuing this conversation. The day will come when your heroes face the consequences of pointlessly killing all the children USAID helped, and you beg for everyone to forget you ever supported it; I look forward to rubbing the salt in your wounds, but until then I have no interest in what you have to say.