January 18, 2007: Bush Usurps Congressional Power in Creating Agency ‘Apparatchiks’ to Enforce Administration Policies

Two weeks after a newly Democratic Congress is sworn in, President Bush issues an executive order directing every agency head to “designate one of the agency’s presidential [political] appointees to be its regulatory policy officer [RPO].” These officers are, according to author and reporter Charlie Savage, “the president’s political enforcers, apparatchiks embedded inside each bureaucracy and empowered ‘to ensure the agency’s compliance’ with his mandates as the professionals went about making decisions on new regulations.” No new regulations or rules can be implemented without the approval of the RPO, allowing them to stop new regulations “before outsiders could learn that agency professionals had identified a health, safety, or environmental problem they thought was worth fixing.” The rule also prevents any rules from being enacted until an agency can identify a specific “market failure” that justifies government intervention instead of allowing businesses to identify and handle problems themselves. Congress had already decided that certain problems, particularly health and safety issues, should be handled through regulation. But now, Bush officials get to override Congress’s intent and allow permissive standards even when a regulation is justified. Business groups hail the decision as an aggressive new attempt to reduce “burdensome” regulations. Critics say that Bush is trying to reward special interests by choking off new rules corporate interests may oppose. The aspect of the order that gets little media attention is the abrogation of Congressional intent and the usurpation of power to the executive branch. The order “achieves a major increase in White House control over domestic government,” says law professor Peter Strauss. “Having lost control of Congress, the president is doing everything he can to increase his control of the executive branch.” [Savage, 2007, pp. 306-307]