Fixing the disposable presidency

OPINION:

The current administration illustrates how deeply entrenched the federal bureaucracy has become. President Biden can lapse in and out of coherence or lounge on a Delaware beach for days on end, and it makes no difference.

When Vice President Kamala Harris was installed as the Democratic presidential candidate, her agenda was created by taking Mr. Biden’s platform and substituting her name for his. The presidency has become an empty shell serving a faceless bureaucracy.

President-elect Donald Trump’s election could change this, restoring the careful balance the founders created when they set up our constitutional republic.

This comes into play as Department of Justice staffers fret over the likelihood that former Rep. Matt Gaetz will be attorney general — at least for a time. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he’s willing to use his power under Article 2 of the Constitution to recess-appoint any nominee blocked by the Senate, which is likely to have a problem with Mr. Gaetz.

Senators are allowed to have a position on this matter; staffers at the Department of Justice are not. Many executive branch employees think they don’t answer to the president — especially at DOJ and agencies such as the FBI. The Federal Reserve, Federal Communications Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also assert independence.

There’s no place in the Constitution for a government entity that wields executive authority without answering to the chief executive. If DOJ, the Fed, the FCC and CFPB don’t do exactly what the president tells them to do, then they can’t be held accountable to the public through their elected representative, the president.

Russ Vought, who served as Mr. Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, has outlined a plan to rein in the rogue agencies that might think they can ignore their new boss because they don’t like what he has to say.

“A lot of policy issues — the border, inflation, wars across the world — all of them are downstream from one reality. That is, the American people aren’t currently in control of their government, and the president hasn’t been, either,” Mr. Vought told Tucker Carlson in an interview.

He proposes going after agency excesses on three fronts. First, get rid of the idea that these agencies can refuse direction from the president. There’s nothing stopping the president from asserting direct authority over the Department of Justice, but various New Deal-era Supreme Court decisions may make it more difficult to rein in agencies such as the FCC and the Fed.

Second, the new administration would bring back the president’s impoundment power to stop the federal government from spending money on anything without the commander in chief’s explicit approval.

Here again, a Supreme Court case from the Nixon era is a roadblock. But Mr. Trump has solid separation-of-powers arguments to revive in the high court to restore an authority presidents used from the founding up to 1974 to prevent reckless spending.

Finally, the president-elect intends to implement his “Schedule F” proposal, which would take significant policy decisions out of the hands of career employees and ensure such choices can be made only by at-will employees. That way, if the decisions don’t line up with what the public just voted for, those at-will employees can be fired.

These are bold initiatives, and if any of them succeeds, it would go a long way to restoring the voters’ control over their government.