When Bureaucrats Veto the President
By Jason Richwine
February 19, 2019 6:30 AM
Judges have pointed to the opinions of the civil service when striking down White House policies.
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W ashington is hotly debating whether President Trump’s wall-building falls within the powers that Congress has delegated to him. But the bureaucracy has been eroding the president’s executive power with much less fanfare. Deference to the “experts†in the “non-partisan†civil service has weakened the principle that government officials who are not accountable to the voters require oversight by those who are. Bureaucrats are now thought to deserve their own independent power base, and the president’s rejection of their expertise can be ruled illegal.
President Trump encountered this mindset just days into his administration. On January 30, 2017, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates announced that she would defy the White House and prohibit the Justice Department from defending the president’s “travel ban†in court. Regardless of what one thinks of the travel ban, Yates’s actions should be troubling. When officials cannot in good conscience carry out the president’s policies, the expectation is that they will resign, not stand in open defiance. The person elected to head the executive branch was Donald Trump, not Sally Yates, and in a democracy all decisions must flow from leaders accountable to the people. The president had no choice but to fire her.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/bureaucrats-civil-service-veto-presidential-policies/
