Why The Bureaucrats Won’t Be Toppled
Full article at Unherd.
Across the Western world, appointed administrators have gained power at the expense of elected legislators. More and more of the most consequential political decisions are made by bureaucrats and judges, while fewer are made by congresses and parliaments. This trend has been slowly underway since the World Wars, and especially in this millennium.
In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.
Even those are beyond the ability of today’s Congress, which is standing idly by as President Trump reforms the government by issuing executive orders to federal agencies. If you took a neutral observer with no emotional attachment to our written Constitution — say, Aristotle — and asked him to describe the role that Congress plays in governing the US today, he would tell you that their job has been reduced to approving the president’s budget requests and bureaucratic appointments, and that they use this power to demand pork-barrel spending in return for the former. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the rise of the European Union has disempowered elected legislatures de jure as well as de facto.
The underlying reason for this widespread political shift is that changes in weapons technology have concentrated military power in the hands of state militaries. Today, governments are less threatened by popular disapproval than they once were. The tacit threat of a popular revolt has been essentially removed. This threat is, historically, the largest check on a state’s ability to override what its people want. It is the ultimate source of an elected legislature’s power.
Continue reading my full article at Unherd.