Say Anything Blog

So...putting political appointees in place at government bureaucracies to ensure that the policies of our elected leaders are carried out correctly is equivalent to the use of “political officers” by communists to enforce party loyalty?

Methinks you’ve gone off the deep end, Mike.  Apples and oranges are both fruit, but they ain’t the same.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

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Mister Adamson,

Quite a stretch there from an apointee of the sitting executive reviewing regulatory efforts of executive agencies (under a system with a unitary executive) and the political officers/commissars to which you allude.

Looks like projection to this observer.

Out Here
Rodney Graves

Out Here
Rodney G. Graves

Ceterum censeo Parthia esse delendam
Latin: “Furthermore, Parthia (Persia aka modern day Iran) should be destroyed.”

Actually it’s the opposite that would be disturbing to me.  Why in the world would we want to leave our country under the charge of an unelected bureaucracy?  Yuck.

Ed Morrisey was all over this at 5AM this morning:

The order ends the tradition of unchecked authority by federal agencies to set up their own rules and apply them capriciously, outside of the control of either Congress or the executive branch. It makes agencies justify any new rules and brings that process into a little more sunlight and holds the bureaucracy accountable. And the only reason that Bush had to sign this order is that Congresses over the past several decades, Republican and Democratic, have done nothing to rein in the imperial bureaucrats who conduct empire-building.

When an agency wants to add more regulation without any Congressional authorization, they have the requirement to submit the proposals to the Office of Management and Budget for review. Most of them have used a workaround called “guidance documents”, which get issued within the bureaucracies and have the force of policy. These documents never get public scrutiny, nor does OMB get a chance to review them before they go into effect. The regulated agencies usually see them, but no appeals process exists to stop them, since they exist outside any mechanisms for oversight.

That is a recipe for the mindless tyranny of petty bureaucrats and explains why regulation has gotten out of hand over the past few years. Even the Democrats used to acknowledge this; Al Gore led a task force for the purpose of undoing the overwhelming and mostly useless red tape within the federal bureaucracy. It went nowhere, and no systemic reforms were even contemplated. The Bush administration has obviously decided to pick up where the Clinton administration left off and actually do something to slow the tide of new regulation.

As Rodney points out above, constitutionally these are Executive branch agencies.  It would take a pretty convoluted mental process to suggest that the duly elected head of the Executive branch of government ought to have no control over the regulatory authority of the agencies which are his lawful responsibility.

OTOH, those doing the complaining over this are liberal Democrats…

“Poverty of goods is easily cured; poverty of the mind is irreparable.”

Just to expand on what everyone else here is saying, we’ve already got a big problem with bureaucrats running the show.  Look at all the leaks to the press from state department and CIA sources clearly with a partisan agenda to undermine the President.

That NIE report that was leaked to the NY Times and selectively reported?  Perfect example.

People talk about these leaks and bureaucratic initiative as though they were good things.  Honest government workers blowing whistles, but in reality a lot of the time it’s partisan government workers trying to shape policy even though it isn’t their job to do so.

If the President is going to take a firmer hand with the bureaucrats I say good for him.  And if the next President should be a Dem I think they should do it too.  For better or worse, we elected that person to lead us and initiate policy.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-- Thomas Jefferson

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