Comment by rayiner
2 days ago
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.