The Administrative State

For John, BLUF:  For a Century the US Congress has been delegating its authornity to Bureaucrats in the Executive Branch or in independenert agencies.  As the author says, this started to be big with President Woodrow wilson.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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A Chink In The Armor Of The Progressive Administrative State

From Manhattan Contrarian, by Mr Francis Menton, 23 May 2022.

Here is the lede plus two:

The great mission of the early twentieth century Progressives was to transform our constitutional order without ever amending the Constitution itself.  The intellectual leader of the movement was Woodrow Wilson.  The fundamental idea was to replace the messy and contentious system of separated powers and slow bi-cameral lawmaking with a cadre of supposedly apolitical administrative “experts” who could run the country smoothly and efficiently. The idea sounded rather benign to most people at the time, and probably still sounds benign to most people today.  Who could be against having “experts” to run significant government agencies?  But a hundred-plus years into this project, we have seen cancerous growth of vast administrative bureaucracies, outside the constitutional structure, and exercising great powers, but accountable to no one but themselves — the very antithesis of the constitutional structure that our founders attempted to bequeath to us. Last week the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans knocked a significant chink in the structure under which many of these agencies operate.  This chink may be only the first of many to come.  But we have deviated very far from the original structure, and the process of conforming the agencies to the constitutional structure will be a long and difficult one.  It is not moving quickly, and likely never will.  In this post I’ll try to give readers some perspective on where we are and where we may be headed, drawing in substantial part on a long post I previously wrote back in 2017.

When I was in grade school in the 1940s and 50s in South Jersey we were taught that President Woodrow Wilson was a great President.  Since then I have learned better.  He was problamatic in terms of race relations and bureaucratic growth and foreign relations and in terms of incapacitated Presidents.

We are talking laziness on the part of our elected representsatives.  And lazyiness on the part of we the voters.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff