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Unless you want all bureaucrats selected by sortition or direct election this is just a gish-gallop. Nobody cares if there are more bureacrats than elected politicians-- we care about the relative distribution of power between them, and between the branches of the government. It would be reasonable to complain about bureacrats having to much power relative to politicians... except for the fact that the politicians have held all the power the entire time, except distributed in such a way that they refused to use it. Trump's executive order therefore does nothing to decrease the power of the bureaucracy, it just takes power away from the legislature and gives it to the president. And sure, that's not hugely far from the "norm" (insofar as one exists), but I'm baffled by the fact that conservatives think that it's a norm violation that long-term benefits them. Yes, they're structurally advantaged in the electoral college-- but not nearly as much as they are in the senate.
If the bureaucracy and executive branch are not the same thing then giving power to the president decreases the power of the bureaucracy.
There's some decent evidence that the bureaucracy and executive are...not always the same thing.
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This is just completely wrong historically. There is and has been almost no oversight by Congress. The APA was intended to rein in agencies but that didn’t work.
Structurally agencies could quickly make rules and unless the rules were hopelessly inconsistent with the statutory scheme they were blessed by courts. No check there.
If Congress wanted to upend the rule, both houses would need to pass a bill (frequently with a super majority in the Senate) AND the President would need to sign the bill. That represents a lot of veto points. In contrast, agencies didn’t face those veto points. So there has been a massive growth of regulations over the years because that was easier and indeed those administrations became more of law writers compared to the Congress or President.
The courts have finally started to push back against independent agencies and this is another avenue to do so.
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