Stronger state futures with separations of power
Greg Ip with Russell Vought, Mick Mulvaney, Donald Moynihan..
How Trump Loyalists Could Make the President Even More Powerful
With a less independent bureaucracy, Trump would exercise far more economic and foreign-policy clout
By Greg Ip, Jan. 11, 2024
… [Russell Vought’s view]: Power hasn’t accrued to the president but to a vast federal bureaucracy that, while part of the executive branch, often functions independently.
Vought, former President Donald Trump’s last budget director, runs the Center for Renewing America. Along with the Heritage Foundation (whose lobbying arm Vought once worked for), they are laying out a road map for expanding the president’s authority.
[MGH to readers: I largely agree the executive should set the agenda and start off by sacking thousands of woke activists embedded in the too-powerful too-unaccountable federal agencies. But we (me and the world?) are repelled by the infantilisation of such serious conservative agendas by their primitivist “under God” mission statements.]
It’s an ambitious agenda that would hand Trump a much freer hand on economic and foreign policy. It’s also controversial. Trump’s critics worry about handing him so much power and cite research suggesting public services could suffer.
For Vought, it’s about making the federal government look like what the Constitution’s framers intended. In an interview at his office a few steps from the Capitol, he argues that many decisions that were supposed to emerge from a tug of war between Congress and the president are instead made by a permanent bureaucracy whose independence is now taken for granted. Fixing this requires “body blows on the notion of independence.”
“If you believe the Department of Justice should be independent of the White House, that’s a paradigm, that’s not a law. That’s not anything other than how you view the world,” Vought said.
Since World War II, the presidency’s influence grew on the domestic front thanks to social programs such as Medicare and on the national-security front due to conflicts including the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Agencies run by presidential appointees regulate everything from food and drugs to banks, securities and the environment.
“The Imperial Presidency,” the title of a 1973 book by historian Arthur Schlesinger, required a vast civil service, now about 2 million strong. Except for roughly 4,000 presidential appointees, they are nonpartisan: an 1883 law decreed they be hired on merit. Yet many conservatives see them as liberals, biased toward obstructing conservative goals.
“There are people who operate on what we used to call Plan B; that plan was always they planned on being there after we were gone,” said Mick Mulvaney, who preceded Vought as Trump’s budget director. “If they didn’t like something they could slow it down.” Mulvaney said when he headed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that he had 1,700 employees, of whom “1,690 were probably there to try to make me fail.”
Vought said career civil servants provide important institutional continuity. “What I don’t want is the hiding of policy options or gearing the menu of what we can do according to their institutional pressures.” He recalls Pentagon officials telling him budget requirements were driven by the need to confront Russia. “That’s a policy call for which you jury-rigged your requirements. That means that we now have no money to do what we need to do vis-à-vis China.”
Vought criticizes a 1974 law taking away the president’s ability to impound—i.e., refuse to spend—congressionally appropriated funds for inverting the framers’ original motivation for giving Congress the power of the purse, which was to put a ceiling, not a floor, on spending.
Vought would like to bring back impoundment, if not through legislation then through the president probing its limits, especially in foreign policy and national security. If Congress votes to send aid to Ukraine, or defund withdrawal from NATO, the president could refuse to go along. The result, Vought said, would be “branch on branch” conflict forcing the two sides to reach a political equilibrium.
In Vought’s view, presidential authority is also undermined by senior civil servants who feel more beholden to congressional appropriation committees than to the White House. The solution: reclassifying about 50,000 top civil servants as “at will”, meaning the president could fire them.
Presidents influence the writing and enforcement of regulations through appointments to departments and independent agencies but historically haven’t dictated those appointees’ decisions, such as which mergers the Federal Trade Commission approves, which crimes the Federal Bureau of Investigation goes after, or whether the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. Since such agency decisions can be so consequential, Vought thinks they should be subject to presidential oversight.
Still, a bureaucracy more accountable to the president could also be less effective. Donald Moynihan, a professor in Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, says research shows that as the bureaucracy becomes more political, its performance deteriorates. Political appointees in the U.S. aren’t necessarily bad managers but are often inexperienced, typically serving only 18 to 24 months, he said.
True, civil servants lean liberal, but Moynihan said they are less ideologically extreme than the Democratic or Republican officials they serve. “If you create a government with more appointees driving the show, then you’re going to create a government that is more driven by ideological goals of the administration.” The result, he said, will be more dramatic swings between administrations on rules and programs. …
… “What if you have a president with authoritarian tendencies who wants to take control of the bureaucracy? That’s the part that really terrifies me,” he said.
… Nonetheless, in a second Trump term, [Mulvaney] suggested Vought’s priorities might not necessarily be the president’s. “Russ is a conservative. Trump is a populist.” While Vought could serve Trump well as chief of staff or budget director, Mulvaney said “I’m curious how he manages his own branch-on-branch conflict.”
To that, Vought said: “What is the right trying to conserve? Are we trying to conserve the woke and weaponized bureaucracy and globalized system? I want to break that. I think Donald Trump wants to smash that. Trump has forced a new conversation on the right about what it means to be conservative.” [END]
On Social Science Files in January-February 2024:
The coming few weeks will be devoted to hardcore books about medieval governance.
I may post occasional Exhibits but will not myself be writing in January.
My thanks to the Wall Street Journal … and the conservative Condorito
Dr Michael G. Heller