[pfannkuchen]

A lot of people don’t like that “regulation” has been delegated to unelected agencies instead of having congress make laws.

Is the current structure of agencies with delegated regulatory powers specified in the constitution? I don’t think so. It isn’t explicitly forbidden, but it’s not like it’s what the founders had in mind or wrote down.

The current administration’s approach is activist in the sense that it would be more direct to just outlaw the current structure via congress. I suspect that isn’t possible at the moment due to the entanglement of corporate interests, regulatory agencies and lobbying money.

Activist action isn’t exactly new though. Maybe it hasn’t happened on the right wing as much in America in living memory, it feels like they felt like they were above it for a long time. They don’t feel like that anymore.

[tsimionescu]

What "many people" don't like about this system is just how effective it is at regulating their businesses. The alternative - that the 535 members of Congress should regulate every detail of every facet of federal life - is completely untenable.

The reality is that Congress has been effectively neutralized as a law making institution for at least two decades, barely able to do more than pass the budget and one or two big items per election cycle. The dream of people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and all the others is that the executive state will be similarly neutered, unable to effectively regulate any kind of big business interests.

The vast majority of the American people neither knows nor cares about the difference between a law that Congress passed and a regulation enacted by an agency of the executive (or between those and state lawd or even city regulations, much of the time). They care whether those rules are useful or detrimental to them. This is why agencies like the CFPB, that Musk and Trump have essentially dismantled (much to Mark Andreesen's delight, I'm sure) was extremely popular: normal people could see how it helped them or their friends. They didn't care that it was pursuing regulations not directly codified by Congress.

[_heimdall]

Said differently, most people don't care about principles.

The government is designed based on certain principles that define how it is meant to work, and there's a reasonable case to be made that the executive branch should not have the authority to functionally create laws or run their own courts. That just doesn't matter to most people, as you said they're happy if those regulations work for them.

The same situation pops up in most peoples' political views too. Most people pick a view on a topic rather than an underlying principle, ending up with contradictory views.

My father-in-law will talk a lot about older Republican talking points like smaller governments and individual rights and freedoms. Then abortion comes up and he wants governments to create laws telling people what they can or can't do with their body, or social security comes up and he's strongly in favor of more taxes and welfare/entitlement programs.

[tsimionescu]

I do agree that people rarely truly care about the principles they claim they adhere to, when it turns against their own interests.

But that is not what is happening here. A principle is not self-motivatingly good just because it exists. The principle that Congress must directly make every law and set every detail of that law is simply a bad principle, at least for a country of the size and complexity of the USA, and given the last 200 years of experience in good and bad governance.

Congress has long understood this, and so they have invested some of their legislative power into various executive agencies, while still maintaining a great degree of control over the broad strokes of what those agencies do.

It's not useful to anyone for Congress to, say, debate and set the exact safe level of every chemical known to man in water that should be enforced: the EPA exists to study this and take the right measures based on the most reasonable scientific knowledge of the day. If the CDC discovers that exposure to teflon above 1 part in 100,000 is likely to cause significant harm, it shouldn't be regulated only once Congress meets in the next session.

[_heimdall]

> But that is not what is happening here. A principle is not self-motivatingly good just because it exists.

The principle I was referring to is that the legislative branch creates law and the executive branch only only administers and executes on them.

I agree a principle is neither good or bad on its own, it just is. In this case it isn't good or bad that powers are separated this way, but it is foundational to how our government is designed.

Congress doesn't have to spell out every detail, I made that clear though maybe in a separate chain of comments here. They do, though, need to spell out whatever details are important to them. If all congress cares about is that a department exists with a certain name and spends every dollar of a given budget that's fine, but they can't complain at all about what the department does. In reality they should be spelling out fairly clearly what is expected of a department, in my opinion that would include metrics for success.