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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Do you think everybody at the EPA is fired and a new batch of people are brought in every time control of the White House changes? The main advantage of these federal agencies is that they were somewhat stable regardless of who is in charge. Career bureaucrats who just do their job decade after decade. Sure the head of the agency gets appointed by the President and they do set a general policy, but it's not like the rulebooks are getting rewritten every 4 or 8 years.

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>The main advantage of these federal agencies is that they were somewhat stable regardless of who is in charge. Career bureaucrats who just do their job decade after decade.

The main assumption you are making here is that these career bureaucrats are not at all partisan, which is a pretty bold assumption to make. I'd like to see some evidence that this is true. That aside, if Congress isn't delegating something to the executive that's their fault. Write better laws. These people are mostly lawyers anyway. What, they forgot how to do it on the campaign trail?

The risk of partisanship is in every profession on earth, not just career epa people.

No, the political appointees who run the EPA do change with a different administration. In the US system, the president (via appointees) runs the agencies.

Yes, the rulebooks are literally rewritten every 4-8 years. EPA examples, Trump renewed the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline (Obama had denied it), 'rewrote key rules curbing U.S. carbon emissions and other environmental regulations' (1), rolled back all of the Obama administration's fuel economy & emission standards, rolled back efficient lighting regulations, etc. He replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined what species are endangered, weakened the Coal Ash rule, revised the Mercury standards. And so on.

He did all of these directly through the EPA- not by passing new laws. Then, Biden reversed all of these

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_policy_of_the_Do...

>Do you think everybody at the EPA is fired and a new batch of people are brought in every time control of the White House changes?

I mean, that's how it used to work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...

Trump has a plan to reclassify 50,000 career bureaucrats as "Schedule F" political appointees.

That seems like a double edged sword. On the one hand, I'm sure every president would like a 50,000 man army to implement their preferred policies. On the other, how does one raise a 50,000 man army these days? This isn't Rome.

It's detailed more in the heritage foundation's Project 2025. The idea is to have an academy for grooming and selecting those political appointees. Essentially, they would have to pledge their allegiance to conservative values (and the president) and pass exams about what they should/should not believe in order to work in the bureaus. This would include vowing to believing climate change isn't a problem.

Of course, that's the short term "republican makes it into office" solution. Past that, to other presidents, I don't know. In my personal opinion, I think they're banking on never having to get there.

> Past that, to other presidents, I don't know. In my personal opinion, I think they're banking on never having to get there.

I think their logic is basically "these people function ~identically to if they were democratic political appointees, so we might as well get the benefits of them being political appointees when we're in office". Whether that's actually accurate can be debated, but it's not just "let's not worry about ever losing ever again".

They should at least stack rank the rank and file and at least quintimate all the slackers after each election cycle, regardless of winner, like clockwork, stack rank and renew. There is too much accumulated putrid growth in many departments -but it hardly ever gets sorted out.

"Trump" does not have a plan to do that and he has repeatedly denounced Project 2025, even pressuring the Heritage Foundation to fire the guy that led the program. I hate the guy but you don't need to lie.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/05/2024/trump-disavows-pr...

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