zlacker

>>karako+(OP)
> The new policy is being carried out as the Trump administration has tightened its hold over federal science funding

Such sentences display such a weird understanding of how the federal government works. How can the administration “tighten its hold” over discretionary grants? These aren’t Congressional appropriations earmarked for specific projects. The administration is the only entity that can exercise control over these grants. It would actually be a huge problem if the administration didn’t have a tight hold on these funds. That would mean grants would be going out without close supervision by any elected officials (Congress or the President).

>>rayine+q6
"The administration" is not a monolithic entity. For the last ~150 years, even though it's had political appointees at the top, the vast majority of its employees have been selected (at least ostensibly) on the basis of merit, not political loyalty. They're supposed to be somewhat insulated from the changing political winds. The layers of bureaucracy in between were created deliberately, to preserve some degree of decision-making independence.

When people talk about "the Trump administration tightening its hold", they mean Trump and his political appointees exerting direct control over things that have a strong precedent for being out of their direct control.

Using the word "administration" to conflate the presidency with the layers of organization below it is the main premise of the "unitary executive theory", which is an extremely recent development of the current Supreme Court. Previously, when Congress said "such-and-such a decision is supposed to be made by the staff of agency XYZ, not by the President/Secretary personally", the courts assumed they meant it.

>>terafl+a9
Yes "~150 years" ago (sounds right to me, not sure on the exact date), there was civil service reform. Prior to that every administration would fire the prior servants and install their own because every political party then and now wanted their own people to be of influence in civil service.

This was replaced with a system where it is very difficult to fire most civil servants but the executive could still select new hires (The Trump administration has tried the firing method via DOGE but with not much luck).

There is a common misconception that this reduces political influence and loyalty. This couldn't be further from the truth. What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.

This meant it is even more important to get loyal ones, since they will be there for a long time and can't be fired. So now we have a large civil service full of loyal people that seemingly often sabotage each other, fighting one loyal group against another loyal group. It might be even worse than before civil service reform.

>>mothba+ga
> What it did was ensure the civil services grew much further, since the only way the next political party in power could regain dominance was to hire even more civil servants until they overpowered the ones already there.

If this were true, why did the number of the federal government employees stop growing in the 80s?

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-work-for-the-f...

>>Modern+Pf
Because after 100 years of growth there was very little room left to keep hiring people, due to pressure on cap of taxes, that's part of why Trump had to resort trying to go back to firing.

Even if it had kept growing, at some point there's a limitation on number of people in the USA that can even work those jobs.

Seems kind of insane to critique the number can't expand to infinity rather to acknowledge it expanded until we got to the point we're already paying 30+% taxes at the upper income bands, plus a large deficit, and there's just very little room left for the populace to tolerate new programs administered by bureaucrats.