I also (like nullc ) agree with his take that the OIRA part is more important. But I’m sort of not sure I agree with his argument about their independence. Walter is brilliant so I may just be missing something that is in his brain and left unsaid. ;)

He agrees that most were never really independent but points out some and goes into a chat about the UET. The UET seems mostly irrelevant here. There is no 4th branch. They are either executive agencies or not.

They are further either exercising power delegated from Congress, or exercising power delegated from the executive. If the former, Trump can’t control them, even under most interpretations of UET, but then you have non delegation problems to deal with. This is the OIG case.

If they are exercising power granted to the executive, it’s literally his right to control them.

The constitution doesn’t give a third option where congress can establish agencies that have power from the executive but the executive can’t control them. They can only establish agencies with no real power that the executive can’t control

I can believe after ~250 years we have some weird edge cases, but it seems fine to clean that up