| I agree with you that the system of federal administrative agencies is a mess. The top federal agencies hold amounts of power bordering on unconstitutional. They seem to represent a rogue branch of government, or at least artificially inflate the role of the executive branch. Of course, the point of the judicial branch is to restrict expansions of power from the other branches. Theoretically the judicial branch has the ability to restrict the capabilities of federal agencies, but it's extremely unlikely we will ever see a heavy ruling against them. There's wayyyyy too much special interest money entangled in the agencies for that to happen. Still, to play devil's advocate, the agencies do have a purpose. They are able to regulate industries that move faster than real legislation. They can employ experts (as opposed to congressmen) to write the rules. Industries like tech and pharmaceuticals are governed by extremely complex market dynamics. The federal agencies that oversee them, such as the FCC (tech) and FDA (pharmaceuticals) employ dozens of experts who are familiar with how the industry actually works. They write the regulations because no other branch of government possibly could. Federal agencies make it possible for congress to write laws with stipulations like "all matters pertaining to <EXTREMELY GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF INDUSTRY SUBTOPIC> shall be subject to the regulations of the <FEDERAL AGENCY> responsible for overseeing <INDUSTRY>." The agencies provide a way for congress to defer the details of lawmaking to a more flexible, adaptable agency that is actually familiar with the complex dynamics of the system being regulated. ..... in theory, of course. Whether this works in practice is another question. One could make the argument that no sufficiently complex market should be subject to any regulation other than the natural market rules. One could also argue that the ability of congress to defer lawmaking to agencies is tremendously unconstitutional and enables them to enact laws with greater breadth than should be possible. Some reading I dug up on the subject: http://heritageaction.com/2011/11/issue-profile-unconstituti... http://www.jpands.org/hacienda/comm19.html tl;dr "Thanks, Roosevelt!" |
That's almost exactly the opposite of the point of the legislative branch, since the other branches have very little power not explicitly granted by the legislature, and the legislative branch principally acts by defining and granting functions to the executive and judicial branches.
> Theoretically the legislative branch has the ability to restrict the capabilities of federal agencies
More to the point, federal agencies only exist because they are created by Congress, and only have powers because they are given them by Congress.
Its not a theoretical power that Congress has over them, but a practical one whose exercise is the only reasons the agencies exist and have any power at all.
If Congress doesn't take action that you think it should against a federal agency, that's because a sufficiently large portion of Congress doesn't want to take that action, not because Congress has only a theoretical but not practical power over the agency.
> but it's extremely unlikely we will ever see a heavy ruling against them.
Congress doesn't make rulings, that's the judicial branch. Congress has substantially restricted the powers of commissions and even abolished them. (A notable example being the one that served as a structural model for pretty much all other "independent" regulatory agencies, the Interstate Commerce Commission, whose powers were stripped in a series of deregulation movements culminating in the abolition of the Commission in 1995.)