Trump targets agencies long seen as above politics. Critics see big risks

Susan Monarez, director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), during her confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington. Monarez was fired this week, White House officials said. The move came after she declined to fire agency officials or to accept all recommendations from a vaccine panel overhauled by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy jnr. Photo / Tierney L. Cross, The New York Times

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has long been the place Americans turned to for data-driven information to help make health decisions.

The Bureau of Labour Statistics was the source of non-partisan jobs numbers by which Americans could judge the status of the economy.

And the Federal Reserve was the independent central bank that often bucked the short-term demands of presidents with an eye toward the country’s long-term economic health.

Now the independence of each of these American institutions is in question after United States President Donald Trump, in a push to root out pockets of independence of government, has fired or taken steps to fire their leaders.

In doing so, critics say, the Trump Administration is risking the credibility of agencies that were long respected as above politics and play a vital role in providing information needed to guide major decisions about the nation’s course.

These are places that “are not supposed to be partisan”, said Chris Edelson, an assistant professor of government at American University.

“The biggest danger is the institution loses credibility, and people can’t count on it.”

In the span of a few weeks, Trump has:

• fired the head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics after a less-than-flattering jobs report;
• has sought to remove a Federal Reserve Board governor amid a push to gain control of the board;
• and has backed his Health Secretary’s decision to dismiss the director of the CDC over vaccine policy.

Lawyers for Susan Monarez, the CDC director, said she was targeted after she refused to “rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives”.

The White House’s efforts represented an intrusion of political warfare into the leadership of federal financial and health policy, which traditionally had been insulated from such interference.

William Galston, a senior fellow and the chairman of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said the purge at the CDC “replaces scientific and medical expertise with ideas about health and disease that have only a bare overlap with the truth”.

Should the credibility of the Federal Reserve be compromised, he said, the risk would be even greater — “the stability of the world economy”, he said.

Galston, who was a policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, said he has watched Trump push the role of the president far beyond what his predecessors would have ever attempted.

“This is the most comprehensive effort that we’ve ever seen from a president to centralise executive power in the hands of the president, to reduce or eliminate islands of independence, to be served by people who are chosen not to oppose his will, and to reduce the power of competing branches of government,” Galston said.

“It’s the centralisation of constitutional power in the executive.”

Trump officials say the President is well within his rights to fire officials who do not share his agenda.

“For years, Republican candidates have campaigned on reining in the power of unelected bureaucrats, but President Trump actually delivered on this decades-long pledge to check runaway government power and spending,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson.

During his first term, Trump cited the Constitution’s Article II, which, he said, gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president”.

In his second term, he is trying to make that maximalist vision of the presidency a reality.

Embracing the so-called unitary executive theory, Trump has signed an executive order that requires independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission to route their regulations and budgetary actions through the White House for review.

He has reshaped the Justice Department, once a seat of independent power, appointing loyalists and his personal lawyers to top positions.

He has reinstated “Schedule F” policy in an attempt to weaken the independence of career civil servants, making them easier to fire.

He has fired or demoted more than 20 inspectors general or acting inspectors general since he took office, stripping pockets of independent accountability from government.

The Administration has suspended around 30 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency after they wrote to Congress warning that the Trump Administration had gutted the nation’s ability to handle hurricanes, floods and other extreme weather disasters.

“Everyone sees this, and people who want to keep their job understand they cannot speak up,” Edelson said.

Conservatives argue that government workers — many of whom Trump derides as members of the “deep state” looking to undermine his agenda — had accumulated too much power in recent years, making decisions about the Covid-19 pandemic that were unpopular among those on the right and viewed by them as highly political.

“You tend to hear those who think that agencies should have insulation from the president describe administrative officials as exercising independence or being apolitical,” said Joel Alicea, a law professor at Catholic University and the director of the Centre for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.

He said there was a flip side to that argument: “By making executive officials removable at will by the president,” he said, “the Constitution ensures political accountability for them to the American people.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Luke Broadwater

Photographs by: Tierney L. Cross

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