The article doesn’t seem to be about abolishing the NIH and NSF. Instead it seems to be about NIH and NSF grants to third parties. That seems to fall squarely on the executive side of the line.
This is the third time I've seen someone pushing this line of thinking on HN in as many days and I'd like to know more about where it's coming from. Can you cite any source that supports it and justifies it?
FWIW, the conventional wisdom is that the independent agencies really are independent, and the president's control over them is exactly what is stipulated in the legislation that created them. If the statute of the Dept of XYZ and says the president can fire its governing board but only on weekends, then he has to wait til Saturday, period end of story. The idea that the president can interfere with the independent agencies because they're part of the executive branch was, AFAICT, invented out of whole cloth in the last couple of years, and has no constitutional support at all. So I'm curious to hear more about what this new theory is and how far it extends. In particular, if the president can decide to cancel NIH grants because the NIH is under the executive branch, what keeps him from raising and lowering interest rates?
edit to add: to be clear, the president does have a great deal of power over most of the independent agencies; in most cases he hires and fires their leaders. But he has that power because Congress specifically granted it, not because the executive branch is his personal fiefdom. If he wants to, say, get a pharmaceutical drug approved, he has to direct HHS to direct the FDA to do that in the usual way, not just decree it. This has little to do with thwarting his power and lots to do with effective and efficient governance.
There really is no limit to the power, but they say the check is impeachment -- if the people don't like it they can elect a congress that will impeach the president. But in reality it doesn't work that way when the president's party controls congress.
It's Civics 101. You should have learned it in 8th grade. Congress makes the laws. The President executes the laws. It's also right there in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-2/ ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.").
If an independent agency is exercising "The executive Power," then it does so derivatively of the President. Article II doesn't say that "the executive branch" shall execute the law. It says: "he"--the President--"shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."
Note also the parallel structure with Article I ("All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States") and Article III ("The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish").
The President is the executive branch, in the same way Congress is the legislative branch, and the Supreme Court and the lower courts are the judicial branch. All of these branches have various offices and subdivisions, but they are within the control of one of those three constitutional actors.
Congress cannot create an entity that exercises executive powers but does not answer to the President any more than the President can create an entity that exercises legislative powers but does not answer to Congress.
> FWIW, the conventional wisdom is that the independent agencies really are independent, and the president's control over them is exactly what is stipulated in the legislation that created them.
That has not been the "conventional wisdom" for anyone who went to law school in several decades. The notion of an "independent agency" exercising executive power independently of the President was an absurd idea cooked up by a racist in the early 20th century who hated democracy and had fantasies of "scientific government" (https://fedsoc.org/commentary/fedsoc-blog/woodrow-wilson-s-c...). It peaked in the mid 20th century, but the project of whittling it back to constitutionality has been ongoing my entire lifetime.
> If the statute of the Dept of XYZ and says the president can fire its governing board but only on weekends, then he has to wait til Saturday, period end of story.
The Supreme Court held in 1926 that the President's removal power over executive-branch officials is essentially unconstrained (Myers v. United States). The Court then reversed itself in 1935 (Humphrey's Executor v. United States) but that case has since been limited pretty much to its facts (Seila Law LLC v. CFPB).
