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> What is the valid democratic process to use if the public doesn't like the unelected officers of the institutions of the executive branch? Mostly they serve
by hackyhacky 2y ago
> What is the valid democratic process to use if the public doesn't like the unelected officers of the institutions of the executive branch?
Mostly they serve at the pleasure of the president, some have to be approved by Congress.
> Is the claim being made that these people have a constitutional right to run the FBI, USAID, etc forever, and the public is not allowed to elect someone to fire them?
No, the claim is that only Congress can allocates funds to create these agencies, and only Congress can de-allocate funds for them, so the executive branch (and whoever the executive branch empowers, whether or not they are a government employee) does not have a right to shut them down.
> From what I can tell, it does look a lot like a coup, of an unelected bureaucracy trying to prevent the elected president from fulfilling his campaign promises that the public elected him for.
The president is not a king. He is the head of the executive branch and has a large degree of control over how the bureaucracy is run, but not total control. Maybe you aren't American or maybe you don't remember elementary school civics, but the US operates on a system of checks-and-balances to prevent any one branch of governement from acquiring too much power. The coup-in-progress is the president apparently subverting those checks and balances.
- derbOac 2y agoNot trying to be sarcastic but everything you're saying is all clearly stated in Article 1 of the Constitution, which branches do what. It feels as if part of what's going on is leveraging of either feigned or real ignorance about how things are supposed to operate.
- mindslight 2y agoPeople's brains have been so broken by corporate authoritarianism they've come to believe it is a template for how everything is supposed to work.
- Gollapalli 2y ago> at the pleasure of the president The point poster above is making is that the president should be able to fire them, and should be able to audit whether or not they have been doing their jobs correctly, which is essentially what is occurring.
- hackyhacky 2y agoNo. What is happening is shutting down of departments without congressional approval, which is unconstitutional. This is being done by an uncleared individual with no government or domain expertise, which is merely a bad idea.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoSpecific actions "by an uncleared individual" may in fact be illegal, not merely a bad idea.
- pas 2y agoThe arbitrariness is the problem. """ the order for [FBI] employees to compile lists of all current and former personnel who worked on investigations related to January 6, 2021, and a Hamas-related case. """ Also, if I understand correctly, agents are civil servants (not political appointees) and they cannot be simply fired at will.
- derbOac 2y agoThere's a process in law for this, and he can't simply remove programs wholesale that have congressionally allocated funds. This is all in law, which is why people are calling this a coup. The coup isn't so much about the firing it's about freezing programs, or cutting them entirely without going through the process of congressional approval.