Jack Goldsmith on Lawfare comments on how often President Trump’s subordinates are ignoring or working around him:
The fractured executive branch is partly a result of terrible executive organization but mainly the product of an incompetent, mendacious president interacting with appointed or inherited executive branch officials who possess integrity. The President says and does things that his senior officials, when asked, cannot abide. And so they tell the truth, often with an awkward wince, or they ignore the President. And in response to this overt disrespect, President Trump does … nothing.
The president seems scary, and he is, but he also has no control over his administration. There is lots of talk about Trump’s threat to the independence of the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence community, and the like. But the truth is that these agencies are operating with an independence to presidential wishes like never before. It’s a very strange state of affairs.
Which leaves the American public with everyone from Mattis on the high end to DeVos and Carson on the low end – all operating with little to no oversight.
For the anti-government types, this is the ideal experiment – do we really need a DoE, HUD, or EPA? Surely we can get along without those, like we did for the first 100 years, they’ll say.
The problem is that discovering we do need them in this way will likely involve enormous damage to the United States, from public health to the education level of our citizens to the welfare of vulnerable citizens, damage that will be slow to fix, will distract us from oncoming catastrophes such as climate change.
And the thing is, some of these should be taking place in the laboratories of the States, as the old saying goes. Some are of a natural national or international significance, such as climate change or foreign relations, but others might be possibly tried in the States.
Like the ideological economic disaster in Kansas. Kansas has been hurt, but the rest of the United States has been spared most of that pain. Now we need to learn from the Kansas mistake. That’s the second half of such experiments.
