alt Hacker NewsIt sucks that Congress don't do their job of making reasonable laws. I hate that the executive and judicial branches have to do so much work that should be done by Congress.
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The administrative state worked extremely well before Trump dismantled it.
Do you really want Congress to use legislation to make decisions about day to day technical rules and regulations that they quite obviously have no chance of understanding?
The whole point of the administrative state is to put non-political experts in charge of hashing out the specifics of rules and regulations while Congress legislates the broad process of making those rules.
An analogy to “making Congress do it” would be like if you had to raise every pull request you wrote to the board of directors of your company and check if they were okay with it. That is insanely inefficient and your board of directors would make the wrong decision most of the time. Instead, your company’s board of directors hires competent people and sets the general goals of the company and directs everyone to work toward them, trusting them with the implementation details and putting in places systems that ensure good performance is rewarded.
In the past we just trusted presidents to operate at some bare minimum level of basic good faith that they were non-traitor citizens who actually wanted this country to succeed, rather than being completely apathetic to the future and viewing American society purely as an asset to exploit.
The idea of a president who would make the country worse on purpose, going as far as making it worse for the wealthy in addition to common people, was unheard of.
But then we elected the New York Russian mafia’s real estate guy. And now we have found out that it’s very likely that his best friend’s sex trafficking operation was potentially used to compile kompromat [1]. The probability that the Russian intelligence apparatus is directly instructing Trump to sabotage the geopolitical position of the USA is astronomical. Part of that sabotage is almost certainly the dismantling of the administrative state.
Call it a conspiracy theory if you want, but we’ve crossed this conspiracy theory bridge many times with Donald Trump and he has never really given any of us a good reason to not trust the idea that “oh, it’s actually worse than we thought…”
[1] https://www.aol.com/articles/exclusive-spy-jeffrey-epstein-p...
> I hate that the executive and judicial branches have to do so much work that should be done by Congress.
In recent years the Supreme Court has turned against the use of regulatory agency rule making authority to stretch the meaning of older statutes and accomplish what Congress is too gridlocked to do. Most notably was the 2022 decision striking down Obama-era EPA power plant carbon emission limits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Virginia_v._EPA), but there are many other decisions in a similar vein (e.g. overturning Chevron), and more coming down the pipe (see https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/10/supreme-court-allows-epa-...).
Between SCOTUS decisions limiting how older statutes can be reinterpreted to encompass global warming on the one hand, and fundamental economic incentives on the other (the West Virginia decision didn't result in a rush back to coal), this move by the Trump administration is unlikely to change the course of things, except to perhaps spur Congress to involve itself more heavily one way or the other.
Rather than handwringing, the left needs to finally accept that relying on lawsuits and aggressive Federal regulatory agencies, rather than the ballot boxes (plural--not just the presidential election), to enact their social and environmental policies is no longer viable. But it's going to be a difficult change because the Democrats sacrificed a ton of grass roots support (real, substantive support, as opposed to professional class and social media popularity contests) as they came to rely almost exclusively on imaginative legalistic and technocratic solutions, an evolution that started decades before the courts took their sharp conservative turn.
I, for one, invite diminished environmental regulatory agencies. In so far as it concerns global warming, renewable energy, and land use (e.g. mass transit, housing, etc), they've become impediments much more than enablers of (net) environmentally friendly change. What does it matter if an agency favors one set of policies over another when it takes years if not decades for projects to make it through the thicket of red tape? For energy policy specifically, the economics favor renewables, so less regulation can only hasten the transition.