Has the president set up an alternative system to promptly and comprehensively communicate public research to the public? Has he given any indication as to what problem this action is solving? Why has he chosen only these particular departments to muzzle? Aren't the press departments of every other executive agency continuing to reinforce the notion that they are an unelected fourth branch of government with their own continuity and agendas?
I think your analogy is reasonable to a point, although corporations and governments are very different. To continue it, is the president going to be forthright to the public about climate change, if the EPA is no longer allowed to issue its own press releases?
As awful as this is, it seems completely legal since the executive agencies operate at the mercy of the President. The President has the authority to tell the EPA to stop researching climate science, or to even disband the EPA.
Have we never considered this scenario before? Has there ever been an attempt to establish independent agencies, not subject to the whims of the White House? (IIRC, maybe the CIA or the FBI are independent agencies?)
The Constitution commits the executive branch to the control of an elected official: the President. Direct communications with the public undermines the notion that agencies are simply bodies that exist to assist the President, and reinforces the notion that they are an unelected fourth branch of government with their own continuity and agendas.
To use an analogy: Samsung should be forthright to the public about exploding Note 7's. But that doesn't mean that Samsung's engineering department should be issuing its own press releases.
The same reason why a company's employees typically aren't allowed to make public statements.
Like it or not, Donald J. Trump is now President of the United States and the public relations of the executive branch are his prerogative.
Given his positions on climate change, deregulation, and energy production, he clearly doesn't want civil servants from certain agencies, many of who's jobs and powers he is threatening to cut, putting out communications that undermine his agenda.
That's a good argument that the president shouldn't formally be denied this power. But it doesn't rebut the claim that it's a bad sign, and that the public might reasonably want to keep track of those signs. Likewise, many tech companies have engineering blogs, and it's reasonable for people to interpret this transparency as a good sign.
A better argument would say that these agencies have been staffed with folks who have irreconcilable ideological disagreements with Trump about the proper role and extent of federal regulation. If firing them en mass is infeasible, restricting their ability to undermine his agenda may be the next best option.
We're not a fucking monarchy. The entirety of the executive branch serves at the pleasure of the president.
And he's entirely within his rights to shut programs down; that isn't censorship. Learn your definitions lest you serve as a strawman for the other side of the argument.
That's not how the current administrative state operates. The white house can nominate the head of the EPA (and a layer of bureaucrats beneath them) and the Senate must approve the nominations. These are political appointees.
The white house cannot say "fire person X" who works for the EPA but was not nominated, because there is (supposed to be) a wall between the political appointees, who must be confirmed by the Senate, and the professional appointees, who are supposed to be protected by a web of laws and whistleblower protections.
So while many people think that the President is the "head" of the administration and can just order it to do whatever he wants, that's not how it's supposed to work. The set of things the EPA is supposed to be doing is set by legislation and the manner in which it does things is also subject to oversight. That doesn't actually stop the politicization of these agencies -- e.g. the CDC studying racism as a public health crisis or gun crime as a disease, or having the IRS investigate conservative groups, etc. The boundary of this tug of war in which the President tries to order an agency to do X and his opponents sue him saying "you can't do this" is exactly the issue of lawfare and the constitutionality of various executive orders. Many such attempts at directing Federal agencies fail or are ruled unconstitutional, but the overall effects of appointing ideologues to leadership positions is felt in things like the newspeak so common now in public announcements.
The process in place ought to be the bureaucracy of the cabinet or department. That's why the president appoints the leaders of each department. That's different than the president requiring all releases to go outside their relevant department for permission.
Exactly correct. The EPA in particular was created by an executive order, rather than by Congress, so theoretically President Trump could make it disappear by executive order.
This is rather simple; EPA is a part of the Executive Branch. He is the Chief Executive. So he can do these things. This is the way the government is set up under the Constitution of the U.S.
> (...) are part of the executive branch of government and report to the President of the United States.
It's very likely, from what we have observed over the past sixty to seventy years, that the Executive Branch does not operate this way in practice. The actual bureaucratic system has probably morphed to allow for deniability and other measures that offer structural protection against political or legal attacks.
President Biden can’t create legislation. That has to come from Congress. McCarthy (R) is speaker of the house.
“Can’t the President issue executive orders?”
Yes but the Supreme Court has been striking down and limiting the EPA from executing on executive orders or other mandates that the agency has. For example last year [1]
> By a vote of 6 to 3, the court said that any time an agency does something big and new – in this case addressing climate change – the regulation is presumptively invalid, unless Congress has specifically authorized regulating in this sphere.
Biden actually has addressed the UN at least once [2] and discussed climate change. He wouldn’t address NATO on this topic because NATO is a defensive military alliance and most NATO members are well aware of climate change risks.
He doesn’t need to explain to other political leaders that his “hands are tied” because they already know and understand how the U.S. political landscape works.
IIRC the Executive gets to do this because the EPA is part of the executive branch. Can congress setup an agency that is outside of the control of the executive?
The President is not a dictator of the executive branch, he is there to execute the law, not set policy that contradicts congressional authorizations, so there are limits on what an EO can do.
* Second, if the money is given to the states as a grant, there isn't much the Federal government can do to restrict the funds. There were attempts, for example by the Trump administration to withhold money to states that don't cooperate with INS, but those were struck down. There were also attempts by the Biden administration to deprioritize farm aid to white farmers, but these were also struck down.
* Third, as the job of the President is to carry out the law rather than set his own policy, if the EO appears to contradict the founding charter of the agency or specific legislation passed by congress, then it can also be struck down. The role of the president in setting policy should be limited to signing or vetoing legislation, not trying to tip a federal agency to go one way or another. Of course no President honors this ideal, they are always trying to affect policy, and the courts are constantly striking down EOs that go too far in that direction.
As to pork barrel spending, it's generally money given to states, negotiated by congressmen. It's really hard to stop that kind of spending via executive order. Some of it you can, most you can't. One of the litigants of the line item veto was Robert Byrd, famous for successfully routing huge quantities of pork to Virginia, primarily by relocating every federal office to Virginia, and funding lots of programs for virginia schools, parks, etc.
Here are some examples:
* Bill to move FBI headquarters to Virginia, building a new office there -- spend up to $X (How will you stop the spending with an EO? Move the headquarters but only build half of the new HQ? The FBI will not like this)
* Bill to build a new post office in Virginia, spend up to $X (USPS is supposed to be independent, so hard to block with an EO)
* Bill to create a cancer research fund to be given to some Virginia university, that can spend up to $X. Again, you are going to tell the grant review board to turn down all those proposals? That's hard to do, especially if the review board works for an independent agency.
But here is stuff that you could do more easily with an EO
* Bill to provide up to $X in hurricane relief to qualified home owners. Now maybe you don't spend the full $X. You can set the requirement to screen applicants to be stricter as FEMA is not an independent agency (it used to be, but now under DHS). You have to be careful how you word the EO, but you could get away with spending less.
So while there are things the President can do to spend less, it's often quite difficult to do once the legislation is passed.
I think your analogy is reasonable to a point, although corporations and governments are very different. To continue it, is the president going to be forthright to the public about climate change, if the EPA is no longer allowed to issue its own press releases?
Edit: Sorry, these agencies are not the only two that have received gag orders: https://sunlightfoundation.com/list-of-federal-government-ag...
Still, it's not every executive agency.
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