One of the most defining and distinctive arguments of the Republican Party—and not just its MAGAnuts—is that the administrative state, the departments and agencies that implement policies and make rules to enforce those policies, is out of control and has to be "drowned in a bathtub," as anti-government activist Grover Norquist has been saying for the past 40 years. More recently, this line of attack has been sharpened into the case for a unitary executive. Its adherents argue that the president should control all the agencies and bureaus that previous Congresses and presidents established to provide bipartisan oversight and a regulatory eye over markets, public health, worker rights, and so on, in furtherance of the laws that broadly structure their work. No executive has ever sought to be as unitary as our current president, who has already sacked any number of directors, board members, and field workers at such agencies as the National Labor Relations Board, and has sought to abolish outright the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If there’s rulemaking to be done, or regulations to be lifted, that’s entirely up to Donald Trump. If the affected parties—American workers, American bank depositors, Americans who breathe the air—can no longer count on agencies established to defend their interests, well, they can just go to court. And indeed, the Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court said as much last year when they ruled in Loper that courts should no longer defer to agency rulemaking, no matter how granular the rule or how specialized the expertise required to even make such a rule. To hell with the agencies, the Court said; leave it to us. And as Trump merrily neuters one agency after another, the Republican consensus is: "If you don’t like it, you can take it to the courts." Except, apparently, when that undercuts the above-mentioned Trump. Last Thursday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the president’s Office of Personnel Management from ordering the mass firing of probationary employees all across the federal government. Should that restraining order become permanent, it could block the ongoing Trump-Musk decimation of every governmental service.
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