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I'll add to the other good reply - in our constitutional system, branches are not allowed to delegate significant amounts of their power to other entities. So

I'll add to the other good reply - in our constitutional system, branches are not allowed to delegate significant amounts of their power to other entities. So congress, for example, cannot delegate making laws to some other entity. The courts, for example, cannot give their judicial power to others. Similarly, the president can't delegate significant executive authority to others. Where are the limits of this? It's usually about delegating significant amounts of power or functions that the constitution explicit calls out as being owned. But the limits are not tested often, so not tons of cases. In the case of agencies, the executive branch also has no power in the first place to either set up, or disband, agencies. This is a power that congress owns. They can't, per above, delegate it, even if they wanted to.

mike_hearn 2y ago
> So congress, for example, cannot delegate making laws to some other entity But this is standard practice, no? The US system is rather unusual compared to Parliamentary systems in that Congress delegates precisely this power to the executive all the time.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  It's muddy but the Executive isn't making laws it makes regulations constrained by and implementing the laws passed by Congress. It's all nominally rooted in some law the Congress passed and instead of just making those interpretations known when they sue you because you're using a financial instrument to defraud people there's a whole process of making it known how the Executive believe the old laws relate to new situations. Congress has neither the bandwidth nor the knowledge to keep abreast of every novel maneuver around the law so they say this type of thing is illegal and this agency is in charge of saying what type new things are. A great example of that are with various toxins and pollutants, there's no system in which we can go through the whole process of making a new law every time we discover that some miracle chemical is giving people giga-cancer. Instead Congress tasks an agency full of experts to decide what safe levels of the giga-cancer causing chemical is and makes sure we only ingest slightly below the LD50 of that so we can statistically live.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    Yeah, but it's a distinction without a difference because some of the "fill in the blanks" stuff Congress does is so vague that executive agencies in practice write plenty of new laws from scratch. It's not just adding specific items to lists. And then there's also plenty of cases where the constitution is just ignored without consequence. The CDC unilaterally announced payments to landlords were suspended during COVID, something it had no power to do. It didn't cause much of a fuss.
    - acdha 2y ago
      Regulations are nowhere near that freeform, and they have extensive public review and commentary. The EPA was in court for years debating whether CO2 could be included under the Clean Air Act because they had to stay in the narrow lanes Congress created. The CDC case seems to make the opposite point: they took a broad interpretation of the public health act, and it was rejected in the courts as exceeding what Congress had intended: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/politics/eviction-moratorium-biden.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/politics/eviction-mora...
      - mike_hearn 2y ago
        Right, of course, it was clearly illegal but during the key period the CDC got what it wanted anyway. There were apparently no repercussions for this behavior, is making a decision this latest struck down by the courts are valid justification under federal employment law of the terminating employees?
        jquery 2y ago
        Clearly illegal? The CDC temporary eviction moratorium went to our conservative Supreme Court and they ruled 5-4 in the CDC's favor. Maybe based on the fact we were dealing with a worldwide pandemic.
        rtkwe 2y ago
srv02 2y ago
I was reading https://apnews.com/article/usaid-foreign-aid-freeze-trump-peter-marocco-8253d7dda766df89e10390c1645e78aa https://apnews.com/article/usaid-foreign-aid-freeze-trump-pe... this morning and that article noted that USAID was apparently established by JFK. Wikipedia confirms that ("... USAID was subsequently established by the executive order of President John F. Kennedy ..."), and although USAID website is down right now, https://web.archive.org/web/20241229151048/https://www.usaid.gov/about-us/usaid-history https://web.archive.org/web/20241229151048/https://www.usaid... seems to confirm that too. I asked ChatGPT and it said many other agencies were established by EOs (e.g. FEMA, NSA, NASA, EPA). Quote from ChatGPT: "Many agencies later received congressional authorization, but their initial formation or restructuring was often directed by executive orders." So it seems like the last paragraph is incorrect.
- DannyBee 2y ago
  It's not wrong, it just depends on what you consider an "agency". If you mean "any organized entity that contains federal employees", by that definition, sure lots of "agencies" exist that are created by the different branches. If you mean "something that can create binding regulations that interpret or implement law" - no, those have to be authorized by congress in some fashion. Even if they are run by the executive later, which is also somewhat muddy. etc Traditionally, they agencies are the things that have officers who are nominated by the president and approved by the senate, and have useful power as a result :) I'll also point out - even the ones that are entirely created by other branches (executive, judicial) have to be funded by congress one way or the other. This includes all the ones you listed. They cannot legally spend money otherwise - ""no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law". Sometimes they are created with a small, more general emergency appropriation or something, but again, if they want to spend money, that also requires them to be authorized and appropriated by congress. Some of the more interesting questions that we have thankfully never had to answer for real (outside of blustering) is around various branches using their power to deliberately interfere with the basic functioning of other branches (except as authorized by the constitution, which, for example, says congress can set the jurisdiction of courts except for the supreme court. Where we've come close to it has mostly been around appropriations designed to force another branch to do or not do a certain thing. We may come a lot closer the next few years depending on what happens. The constitutional limit is easy (none of them is more powerful than the other, and may not interfere with the basic sovereignty of each other), but the lines are not.

mike_hearn 2y ago

> So congress, for example, cannot delegate making laws to some other entity But this is standard practice, no? The US system is rather unusual compared to Parliamentary systems in that Congress delegates precisely this power to the executive all the time.

rtkwe 2y ago
It's muddy but the Executive isn't making laws it makes regulations constrained by and implementing the laws passed by Congress. It's all nominally rooted in some law the Congress passed and instead of just making those interpretations known when they sue you because you're using a financial instrument to defraud people there's a whole process of making it known how the Executive believe the old laws relate to new situations. Congress has neither the bandwidth nor the knowledge to keep abreast of every novel maneuver around the law so they say this type of thing is illegal and this agency is in charge of saying what type new things are. A great example of that are with various toxins and pollutants, there's no system in which we can go through the whole process of making a new law every time we discover that some miracle chemical is giving people giga-cancer. Instead Congress tasks an agency full of experts to decide what safe levels of the giga-cancer causing chemical is and makes sure we only ingest slightly below the LD50 of that so we can statistically live.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Yeah, but it's a distinction without a difference because some of the "fill in the blanks" stuff Congress does is so vague that executive agencies in practice write plenty of new laws from scratch. It's not just adding specific items to lists. And then there's also plenty of cases where the constitution is just ignored without consequence. The CDC unilaterally announced payments to landlords were suspended during COVID, something it had no power to do. It didn't cause much of a fuss.
  - acdha 2y ago
    Regulations are nowhere near that freeform, and they have extensive public review and commentary. The EPA was in court for years debating whether CO2 could be included under the Clean Air Act because they had to stay in the narrow lanes Congress created. The CDC case seems to make the opposite point: they took a broad interpretation of the public health act, and it was rejected in the courts as exceeding what Congress had intended: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/politics/eviction-moratorium-biden.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/us/politics/eviction-mora...
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      Right, of course, it was clearly illegal but during the key period the CDC got what it wanted anyway. There were apparently no repercussions for this behavior, is making a decision this latest struck down by the courts are valid justification under federal employment law of the terminating employees?
      - jquery 2y ago
        Clearly illegal? The CDC temporary eviction moratorium went to our conservative Supreme Court and they ruled 5-4 in the CDC's favor. Maybe based on the fact we were dealing with a worldwide pandemic.
        rtkwe 2y ago

srv02 2y ago

I was reading https://apnews.com/article/usaid-foreign-aid-freeze-trump-peter-marocco-8253d7dda766df89e10390c1645e78aa https://apnews.com/article/usaid-foreign-aid-freeze-trump-pe... this morning and that article noted that USAID was apparently established by JFK. Wikipedia confirms that ("... USAID was subsequently established by the executive order of President John F. Kennedy ..."), and although USAID website is down right now, https://web.archive.org/web/20241229151048/https://www.usaid.gov/about-us/usaid-history https://web.archive.org/web/20241229151048/https://www.usaid... seems to confirm that too. I asked ChatGPT and it said many other agencies were established by EOs (e.g. FEMA, NSA, NASA, EPA). Quote from ChatGPT: "Many agencies later received congressional authorization, but their initial formation or restructuring was often directed by executive orders." So it seems like the last paragraph is incorrect.

DannyBee 2y ago
It's not wrong, it just depends on what you consider an "agency". If you mean "any organized entity that contains federal employees", by that definition, sure lots of "agencies" exist that are created by the different branches. If you mean "something that can create binding regulations that interpret or implement law" - no, those have to be authorized by congress in some fashion. Even if they are run by the executive later, which is also somewhat muddy. etc Traditionally, they agencies are the things that have officers who are nominated by the president and approved by the senate, and have useful power as a result :) I'll also point out - even the ones that are entirely created by other branches (executive, judicial) have to be funded by congress one way or the other. This includes all the ones you listed. They cannot legally spend money otherwise - ""no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by law". Sometimes they are created with a small, more general emergency appropriation or something, but again, if they want to spend money, that also requires them to be authorized and appropriated by congress. Some of the more interesting questions that we have thankfully never had to answer for real (outside of blustering) is around various branches using their power to deliberately interfere with the basic functioning of other branches (except as authorized by the constitution, which, for example, says congress can set the jurisdiction of courts except for the supreme court. Where we've come close to it has mostly been around appropriations designed to force another branch to do or not do a certain thing. We may come a lot closer the next few years depending on what happens. The constitutional limit is easy (none of them is more powerful than the other, and may not interfere with the basic sovereignty of each other), but the lines are not.