alt Hacker NewsIt might well be the case that, today, the executive branch (which includes essentially the entirety of what most people consider “the federal government”) is largely staffed by those who want to paralyze it.
You can certainly say that these people are right to try to resist the changes Trump is trying to make. But, like it or not, Trump is the democratically elected President, and it’s quite a challenge to come up with a conceptual model of American government that prevents him from exercising his constitutional authority over the Executive branch.
Perhaps. But I think we can agree that this is indeed not the usual case.
The majority of what he's doing is "merely" unheard of norm violations. But much of the authority he's exercising do not clearly appear to be legal, or constitutional. There are tendentious arguments for much of it being legal, of course, but they're not slam-dunks -- precisely because they would put the entire the executive branch effectively above any law or constraint.
In any other organization it would be clear that even when the head gives you an illegal or an ultra-vires orders, you're not supposed to actually follow them.