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Comment by gmerc | Hacker News Reader

Does it in the light of how the US government actually works?

Creating a separate arm of the government accountable to neither the president nor congress seems like the legal equivalent of a rootkit

Trying to prevent some future elected government from changing course? I can see the appeal, but yeah, it sounds like a bad precedent.

Congress could always change the laws that govern it. This just prevents a single executive from replacing the head and neutering the agency as the tides change

That's not a desirable feature in a representative democracy.

I think you kinda want some institutional inertia though.

Your representatives are in congress

Not having a unitary executive seems perfectly compatible with representative democracy.

Similar to supreme court judges

You’d be surprised how few representative democracies suffer from the same whiplash inducing pendulum effect the US suffers from.

In most western nations the top civil servant and all those below them are non-partisan career civil servants that keep the ship running at all times and have better employment protections than the average employee (which already requires for cause in those countries).

A new Minister’s (Secretary in US parlance) role is mainly that of someone who plots a course and the civil servants in the ministry try to follow it.

As a side note, the concept or “government shutdown” is also entirely foreign in those countries, if not outright ridiculous.

The president and the entire executive branch have an obligation to faithfully execute the law. For all officers of the United States, that is a sworn obligation.

And how has that been going with Trump? This feels like a prayer at this point

Of course that's appealing when it's something you want, but what would think of it if the Republicans win the House, Senate, and Presidency again (as they did in 2016) and do something similar?

For example, they might create an Administration of Land Management with authority over all extraction rights on federal land, funded by fees paid for those rights, and with a director the President cannot remove except for cause.

And it wouldn't be possible for Democrats to change that until they too won the House, Senate, and Presidency at the same time.

A government full of agencies like that would make elections mostly irrelevant, and things would change only when one party won everything.

Someone said it earlier, but this horror you’re describing is the case in plenty of developed countries.

Many of those countries have parliamentary systems where the chief executive is always from the majority party (or coalition) in parliament, so they never have the divided governments that are so common in the US.

Many also have a House of Lords or Bundesrat or something similar that is not elected by the people, whose purpose is to make the government less democratic. We should not try to be more like those governments.

Of those that remain, how many have agencies not subject to the chief executive like the CFPB?

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