Who knows? The executive orders read like they were written by children and don't clearly define what they mean by "DEIA". But NSF's authorization is from Congress. Unless congress passes a law rescinding this as a part of what counts as broader impacts, or the Supreme Court rules that increasing participation of underrepresented groups is unconstitutional (by precedent it is certainly not!), then NSF cannot simply change the definition of broader impacts.
NSF is an independent agency, and the degree of control over it which a President can legitimately exercise is disputed, but presidents from both parties have treated the independent agencies as being subject to executive orders.
They're created by Congress but administratively part of the executive branch, as described in the first two paragraphs of the linked wiki article, and they're independent so they can be insulated from politics and regulate effectively.
I believe that Independent Agencies were created by the Progressives of the early 20th century. They were subsequently found to be constitutional, through somewhat dubious reasoning, and it seems like they’re now too big to fail.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. Exactly what I was referring to, they are extra-Constitutional at best. And now the executive is rightfully taking them back under control
I think a better approach would be to rewrite the Constitution, taking into account what has been learned over the centuries. The executive branch should become more like a bureaucracy and less like a monarchy. In particular, department heads should have a degree of independence from the President, and it should only be possible to remove them before the normal term expires by impeachment or if the President and the Senate agree.
Agree in theory that we should try to rewrite our foundational laws rather than twist or ignore them.
Disagree with your specific proposals though. I want more accountability, not less. Your proposals also rely on Congress stepping up, which it hasn't done in some time
The way I see it, the dysfunctionality of the Congress and the rule by executive orders have made the President closer to an elected king than the chief executive of a republic. The US is now closer to a monarchy than the actual monarchies in Europe.
It's one thing to have a presidential republic, because you want an independent executive branch. (Unlike in parliamentary republics, where it's subordinate to the legislative branch.) But vesting so much power in a single individual is against everything a republic stands for. It's better to have an executive branch consisting of many independent departments than everyone serving at the will of the President.
> The way I see it, the dysfunctionality of the Congress and the rule by executive orders have made the President closer to an elected king than the chief executive of a republic. The US is now closer to a monarchy than the actual monarchies in Europe.
This is not new, and not caused by “Congressional dysfunction”, it is inherent in the design of the American system. To quote an editorial in the long-defunct Knoxville Journal, published all the way back in 1896 (February 9): "Great Britain is a republic with a hereditary president, while the United States is a monarchy with an elective king"
The British historian David Cannadine argues [0] that the American Founding Fathers created an elective monarchy, instead of a republic, in part because from the other side of the Atlantic they didn’t understand that the King was already more of a figurehead than a genuine power, and that the Prime Minister and Parliament were the ones who called the shots. So they gave the President, not the very limited powers that King George III actually had in practice, nor the less limited but still quite constrained powers of the Prime Minister, but a rather large chunk of the much more expansive powers they mistakenly thought the King still had-and their “checks and balances”, despite being conceptually neater than those in the UK, in some ways turned out to be weaker. In 1776 and 1787 (writing of the US Constitution), the modern office of Prime Minister was still a relatively new development-it is generally considered to have begun with Sir Robert Walpole’s appointment as First Lord of the Treasury in 1729-prior to that, the First Lord of the Treasury was closer to a finance/economics minister than a national leader.
"independent agencies" isn't meant to be at the same level of the "Big Three", but rather agencies that are deliberately created by the Legislative branch (typically) to be as independent as the constitution allows. We don't need the president, congress, and the supreme court to vote/judge on every single decision that happens in this country. We create bodies to do that for us.
I will take the SCOTUS opinion on these laws being Constitutional over an comment on hackernews. We'll see what happens, I'm sure that Trumpy will try and get it to SCOTUS and test such institutions.
