Here’s a proposal: If you want agencies that set policy and priority to be independent of the Executive, don’t make them part of the executive branch!
The issue with such agencies is really that their missions are split: they are as much legislative as they are executive. Congress, in its wisdom (or recklessness) has delegated some large measure of its legislative authority, the authority to create the rules by which we live, to such agencies; but they have also tasked those same agencies with enforcing the rules that they, themselves, concoct.
Does that not violate the spirit, if not the actual text, of the Constitutional separation of powers?
Continue reading