Comment by ModernMech
2 days ago
> grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).
Given the large number of grants that go out, and the relatively small number of elected congress people and presidents to supervise them, and given that their role actually isn't to closely supervise such things, it's not possible to meet a standard where elected individuals are closely supervising grants. As a society, we have decided that the upside of having many grants to maximize the number of opportunities for innovation is more beneficial than having a small number of grants elected individuals can closely supervise. Therefore we have decided to give the work of supervising and allocating grant funding to experts in their fields. This was decided democratically by elected people for a number of reasons.
For one, we have no reliable process to cause good innovations to happen. The best way we know so far is to try very many things and hope that some of them will have very good results. Having a system where we can only fund a small number of projects because we require them to be closely supervised by elected individuals would necessarily mean fewer good innovations (lower ROI).
Another matter is that close supervision by elected people does not guarantee that those funds will not be misused. Instead, what might happen is that small group of people will act in their own self interest, which might be to just become reelected and profit off their position. Researchers' incentives are more strongly aligned to produce good research with federal dollars because their whole careers depend on it. Elected people have no incentive to produce good research, because their careers only depend on being reelected, and reelection does not depend on doing good research, but being popular. A lot of times what's popular does not correlate with what's good research.
Is the system we have perfect? No. But no one has proposed anything better; most of the time what people propose just reinvents the system we have and all its problems (because they don't understand how the system works in the first place), or invents new (worse) problems this system doesn't have.
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.
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