Does President-elect Donald Trump‘s budget honcho, Russ Vought, believe there is only one branch of government? Or four? Or does he argue that the executive branch is superior to legislative and judicial?
No, he doesn’t. But you would think he believes one or all of those things if you learned about him from the New York Times.
On Wednesday, the outlet published a story on Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s first term and has been renominated to run it again.
The OMB is part of the White House. That means it is within the Executive Office of the President along with other offices, such as the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Security Council.
The outlet’s piece reports that Vought’s mission is to give the White House more control over the bureaucracy and to gain some more control over the purse strings.
These could be understood as two different projects: One to reassert the president’s control over the executive branch (a power struggle within one branch), and the other to increase the executive branch’s control over government (a power struggle between two branches). But they are both fundamentally about whether a federal agency can act independently of the president.
The idea at play here is the notion of a “unitary executive.”
Article II of the Constitution begins with this sentence: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
It doesn’t invest the executive power in the “President, attorney general, the employees at the IRS, and the director of the Alcohol Labeling and Formulation Division at the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau of the Treasury Department.”
The unitary executive theory holds that the entire executive, from the FBI to the White House cook, are agents of the president. Bureaucrats and appointees exist to carry out, on the president’s behalf, the laws passed by Congress.
The outlet’s piece waded into this debate, however, with this phrase: “The unitary executive theory that rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches and argues that presidential power over federal agencies is absolute.”
Contrary to the New York Times, no definition of the unitary executive theory has ever rejected the existence of three separate branches.
Without noting the change, the outlet edited the text, replacing “separate” with the phrase “separate but equal.”
Even this corrected version is a misstatement. Just look at how other New York Times reporters defined the unitary executive theory in the past.
Charlie Savage, who has written the most about it for the outlet, described it this way: “The so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the Constitution gives the president exclusive control of the executive branch.”
In his book, Savage described it this way: “Every official inside the executive branch is nothing more than an appendage of the president and should take no action and offer no opinion opposed by the White House.”
This isn’t an assertion of the superiority of the executive. Does the unitary executive theory curb Congress’s power? Sure. It says Congress may not delegate new powers to the attorney general independently of the president’s control. But that hardly places the executive over Congress. It merely rejects the idea that bureaucrats can carry out the executive power against the orders of the president.
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The irony, then, is that those who deny the unitary executive might be the ones denying there are three branches of government — they are positing a fourth branch of government, which is the “independent” executive, not under the control of any elected official.
It’s an interesting debate. It’s not easy to resolve. Apparently, it’s also not easy to explain.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
