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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't blame congress for this. Here's the CARES act: https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hr748/BILLS-116hr748enr.p... The section begins on page 179.

It directs the FDA to set these fees to raise a certain amount... but it lets the FDA decide how they want to do that. (There are other fees set in the law, but those arent the ones the article is complaining about.) They publish these fees in the federal register, and they become effective after a short while. This is part of the normal rule making process that the executive branch is responsible for... these rules fill in the blanks in legislation passed by congress.

The FDA published these prices yesterday on Dec 29th. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/12/29/2020-28...

Theres nothing in the CARES act that requires the FDA charge distilleries.

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> I wouldn't blame congress for this ... but it lets the FDA decide how they want to do that.

That's blameworthy. Congress routinely cedes what are essentially legislative powers to such agencies. It helps them dodge responsibility. IMHO it improperly transfers Article I powers to the Article II branch.

Not so much. The agencies are staffed with career professionals who are better equipped to do day-to-day and cumulative fact-finding. Congressional staff is spread thin over 535 representatives and senators and has huge turnover. I'd rather have the FAA doing line-item regulation than the Subcommittee on Aviation.

There's no reason Congress can't staff their own career professionals.

this is the general answer. Why is congress punting the "lawmaking" bureaucracy to the executive instead of it being under its own branch.

There are 2 possible reasons I see.

1) having to change the political leadership of it every 2 years (instead of 4) means it possibly wont be as effective.

2) as there is both a "lawmaking" and "enforcement" aspect to it, it makes sense for it to be under "one roof" so to speak, and it would probably be more problematic for the executive to cede that to congress than vice versa.

perhaps there are other reasons? and one can counter the above reasons?

1) Congressional leadership tends to change hands less often than presidential. 2) I'd argue that the two powers are separable. The subgroup writing the rules tends to be different from the one executing them. There's also nothing stopping these groups from consulting with one another.

is 1 really true? we have elections every 2 years for it. how many periods of time have we had no change in control of the senate or the house for 4 2 straight elections? what about fo 4 straight? vs how many times we've had dual term presidents? (serious, don't know the answer to that question, though i could probably look it up)

> is 1 really true? we have elections every 2 years for it. how many periods of time have we had no change in control of the senate or the house for 4 2 straight elections? what about fo 4 straight? vs how many times we've had dual term presidents? (serious, don't know the answer to that question, though i could probably look it up)

You can take a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat.... You'll notice that the individual chambers of congress change hands less often than the presidency.

Additionally, Congress has a high incumbency rate. Even in huge swing years like 2018, the makeup of Congress remains largely the same.

Negative, agencies are staffed with career bureaucrats, who become entrenched with Federal employment protections for decades. It’s a permanent bureaucratic ruling class, with personal beliefs, philosophies, and politics. Remember, the “resistance” ? For everything Trump did, requiring the two rules be rescinded for every one rule approved, may be his greatest legacy.

I don’t think the Constitution prevents Congress from delegating precise decisionmaking to agencies of the executive branch. This seems to be a recent invention by people who want the US government to be even less effective than it is today. Because trust me, having Congressional staff micromanage regulatory agencies through a committee process is going to lead to vastly worse outcomes than what we have right now.

This isn't anything new and it's certainly not specific to this situation. It's debatable whether this is a legislative or executive function.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Rulemaking

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