{"id":15857,"date":"2025-06-04T10:05:50","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T17:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/douglaslucas.com\/blog\/?p=15857"},"modified":"2025-07-03T12:49:23","modified_gmt":"2025-07-03T19:49:23","slug":"extra-material-rollingstone-reorganizing-government-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/douglaslucas.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/04\/extra-material-rollingstone-reorganizing-government-act\/","title":{"rendered":"Extra material for my Rolling Stone article about the Reorganizing Government Act of 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Mashed up by me from H.R. 1295<\/a> text via Congress.gov, Creative Commons photo<\/a> of White House, and vector graphic<\/a> of crown<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note: My Apr. 4 blog post<\/a>\u2014<\/em>#TeslaTakedown Pt. 1 of 3: Crash course in Elon Musk, the DOGE coup, and resisting same\u2014I published as part one of three. Under my own Douglasian reorganization authority, and to make my own life easier, I hereby declare this post part two of that series. Part three comes\u2014eventually!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On June 4, Rolling Stone<\/em> published my latest article<\/a>: Republican bill would legalize DOGE and let Trump dismantle everything: The Reorganizing Government Act is a longshot in the Senate, but that could change\u2014and so would the separation of powers<\/em>. [Note added July 3: MSN<\/a> and Yahoo<\/a> republished it without paywalls.]<\/em> As usual, I drafted more text than could be squeezed in, so please find below bonus material\u2014mostly concerning statutory presidential reorganization authority’s history and some political philosophy\u2014for the truly autodidactic among ye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A short history of reorganization authority power struggles<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Reorganizing Government Act of 2025’s House sponsor, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), portrayed<\/a> his bill during the Mar. 25 House Oversight Committee session as a fairly routine granting of long-gone special powers. “I want to reiterate that between 1932 and 1984,” Comer said, “presidents submitted more than 100 reorganization plans, presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan, used this authority to create or dismantle federal agencies.” While President Reagan did briefly hold Congressionally granted reorganization authority, he didn’t use it to create or dismantle any federal agencies\u2014he didn’t even submit a single reorganization plan to Congress. To give Comer’s Southern drawl the benefit of the doubt, it sounds like he just misplaced the clause “presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan” in his sentence. It should have gone after “between 1932 and 1984″\u2014then it would have been accurate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Comer also claimed<\/a> \u201cPresidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama requested renewed and expand[ed] authority\u201d to submit reorganization plans. None of those past presidents obtained the authority, especially because, not to embarrass Comer or anything, Clinton never even asked. At the meeting, no Representative corrected Comer, but the Congressional Research Service report he received<\/a> unanimous consent to enter into the record, does<\/a>. (It also explains the accurate Reagan history.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clinton in 1993 tasked Al Gore with cutting bureaucratic costs, and in each term, the then-vice president’s National Performance Review<\/a> pursued that mission. Among the Review’s thousands of pages<\/a> was indeed the recommendation<\/a> that the White House seek reorg. authority. But the Clinton administration never took up the idea in earnest, much less<\/a> formally requested such powers from Congress. Comer’s claim, apparently an attempt to turn such minutiae into a main character to normalize an unprecedented power grab for Trump, is specious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back in January, Trump told<\/a> Congress that DOGE \u201cis headed by Elon Musk\u201d; Musk claimed<\/a> the austerity team is akin to the concluded National Performance Review, which was a White House-led task force\u2014as DOGE arguably is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Gore\u2019s crew traveled the country to listen to agency staff and compile their ideas into wonkish suggestions for Congress and Clinton to consider\u2014and faced no serious legal challenges. In contrast, Musk and his 34-time<\/a> felon<\/a> president stand accused, in the AFGE lawsuit<\/a>, of top-down rogue lawbreaking to dismantle government unilaterally from under the White House cloak of an efficiency task force. In their complaint, the plaintiffs write: “In sum, OMB [Office of Management and Budget], OPM [Office of Personnel Management], and DOGE have usurped agency authority, exceeded their own authority, acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, and ignored procedural requirements by requiring federal agencies throughout the government” to “Impose cuts to functions and staffing according to ‘targets’ and ‘goals’ imposed by DOGE.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk boasted<\/a> of his team, “all of our actions are maximally transparent\u201d\u2014yet they tell<\/a> requesters<\/a> suing<\/a> for records under<\/a> the<\/a> Freedom of Information Act, No way<\/a>, even after a federal judge found<\/a> in March that DOGE is “likely covered by FOIA.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were actually a cabinet-level department created through Congress, it\u2019d be very subject to FOIA and other obligations. But DOGE’s ‘name’ is a mere label Musk styled<\/a> after a dog- (or doge-<\/em>)themed<\/a> cryptocurrency he\u2019s<\/a> denied<\/a> owning<\/a> in a contentous, closed court case. The operatives’<\/a> continuing refusal to disclose their names and their literal<\/em> opacity\u2014papering<\/a> over windows in a basement conference room\u2014has encouraged accusations, including<\/a> from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), that the crew<\/a> of hacker-y twentysomethings is a “shadow government.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the Oversight session, Comer ignored or dismissed concerns about DOGE\u2019s doings, painting<\/a> his bill and the Trump administration as simply cleaning the government up of unnecessary bureaucrats: “We have to have a reorganization of the government\u2014it’s gotten out of hand over the past 4 years! Bureaucracies have grown, bureaucrats have increased in number, and the people taking it on the chin in the federal workforce are the ones who actually do the work at the bottom of the organizational chart. This is a reorganization for them!” (Yeah, sure.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Curiously, Comer didn\u2019t discuss the first Trump administration’s reorganization authority request<\/a>. The related Reforming Government Act of 2018 died prior to floor voting. Unlike Comer’s legislation, the Trump 1-era<\/a> bills<\/a> expressly forbade<\/a> plans to ax independent regulatory agencies or all of their statutory programs and would have constrained the presidential powers by limiting them to “consolidation authority.” Like moving a computer file from one directory to another, deleting the former location’s in the process and hoping everything works out with the file in the fresh spot, consolidation authority would have presumably preserved whichever statutory programs’ existence when shifting their position in the org charts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consolidation authority similarly made the Trump 1 request less extreme<\/a> than failed Republican reorg. authority legislation from earlier in the 21st century<\/a>. President George W. Bush was, like top Trumpers<\/a> now, pushing<\/a> maximalist unitary executive theory: flex the presidency by bending or breaking<\/a> the Constitution. Bush 43 would have obtained statutory reorganization authority\u2014unexpiring\u2014to propose ending departments, independent regulatory agencies, and some\/all of either\u2019s statutory programs, but only if his White House deemed the targets intelligence related. Obama<\/a>\u2019s request<\/a> for two-year authority, by contrast, would have left independent regulators alone and stayed under consolidation authority for his plan to merge<\/a> particular executive organizations: he said he’d arrange six of them into a new take<\/a> on the Commerce Department, eliminating<\/a> the old one in the process\u2014so he technically needed the power to abolish departments. Republicans feared<\/a> he wouldn’t stop with the Commerce Department, but that dispute seems minor compared to today’s Trumpian dismantlings: Neither Obama nor Bush 43<\/a> were boasting that they were gunning to end the Education Department altogether, as Trump is. And the expansive Reorganizing Government Act of 2025 envisions no consolidation authority constraint for Trump 2, making Comer\u2019s comparison of his bill with Obama\u2019s request bogus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In hindsight, the Trump 1 effort<\/a> comes off like a befogged dry run for the Heritage Foundation, much of the brains<\/a> behind<\/a> it\u2014and behind today’s more<\/a> prepared<\/a>, Project 2025-shaped<\/a> Trump 2. After all, ideas<\/a> for reorganization plans that emanated quietly<\/a> from his relatively inexperienced, disarrayed first administration strangely amalgamized cross-partisan priorites: a smattering of low-profile, quasi-technical moves, among them merging food safety programs; centrist or liberal schemes like spinning off FAA air traffic control into a nonprofit corporation to better procure the latest, best staff and technology with less political interference; and conservative fixations such as prepping the U.S. Postal Service for privatization. That last is a jaw-dropping commonality between the 2018<\/a> and 2025 bids. In March, Musk agreed<\/a> with Trump that the familiar, constitutionally authorized<\/a> snailmailmen should be delivered to industry, saying, “we should privatize anything that can be[.]”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This most recent<\/a> of reorg. authority’s three historical phases has seen Congress deny every presidential request for it since the statute last expired in (of all years) 1984.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometimes, these 21st-century bids have downplayed their expansive scopes by trading on the authority’s preceding, more widely popular mid-20th-century phase. That\u2019s when Congress, often routinely, blessed most presidential reorg. plans, not infrequently advertised as merely improving the government\u2019s operational mechanics. Reorganizers promised to steer clear of normative beliefs (somehow)\u2014to remain agnostic about what Uncle Sam should<\/em> do\u2014and instead hyperfocus on tweaking how<\/em> government operates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These wonkish middle-phase<\/a> plans\u2014President Carter’s among them\u2014have been lampooned as nothing more than “boxology”: shuffling agencies around on the org-charts without really fixing anything. Sometimes they have<\/em> been rather mundane: President Kennedy\u2019s first reorganization plan<\/a> in 1963 restructured<\/a> the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library with a change-up involving<\/a> \u201cten guards, one repairman, and two janitors at a total cost of $87,000 a year.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other times, second-phase reorganization authority, largely freeing presidents from lawmakers’ snail-speed deliberations and entrenched dependencies on specific districts and states, facilitated surprising results quickly from a birds-eye view. For example, President Nixon’s third reorganization plan<\/a> in 1970 created the Environmental Protection Agency, now targeted<\/a> by DOGE<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Searches for historical evidence of major savings from this better-liked second period\u2014or any<\/em> period\u2014of presidential reorganization authority will find<\/a> little<\/a>, aside from some of its uses in winding down World War II. The same report<\/a> from 2012 that Comer entered into the record states that there have been “few instances in which reorganization plans resulted in documented cost savings.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reorganization authority’s earliest phase wasn’t so much about money, but about the first half of the 20th century generating widespread, amped-up hopes that significantly strengthening executive power to advance social goals could lead to sizable restructurings that would help heal the deep, long-lasting traumas of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The historical analogy isn\u2019t lost entirely even on the unscholarly Donald Trump. He’s repeatedly invoked<\/a> comparisons between himself and Roosevelt, who during the Great Depression and into the 1940s wielded enormous executive power mainly for very different ends: progressive New Deal social programs and fighting Axis countries instead of Trump’s You’re fired!<\/em><\/a> commands for ever-smaller government and aligning<\/a> with fascist<\/a> leaders<\/a>. Further, whereas<\/a> Trump’s dismantlings this year have proceeded through a barrage of 150+ executive orders<\/a>, many legally questionable\u2014some<\/a> paused by courts pending litigation\u2014Roosevelt revamped government largely by ensuring Congress passed well-crafted, durable legislation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vanderbilt political science professor John A. Dearborn, who specializes in power shifts between Congress and presidents, told me that “FDR primarily viewed reorganization authority as a way to make government work more efficiently, and better, rather than simply as a tool to drastically cut back on agencies and functions.” That included a failed 1937 attempt to establish, at the same time as his proposed restructuring legislation would have granted him reorganization authority, a new Department of Public Works and a new Department of Social Welfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Like Trump,\u201d Dearborn said, \u201cFDR was accused of seeking too much power for the presidency. He framed<\/a> his ambitious reorganization proposal in 1937 as a way to ‘prove to the world that American Government is both democratic and effective’ while authoritarian systems were on the rise abroad. Congress scuttled many of the boldest elements of that plan”\u2014among them not requiring him to seek Congressional review and its lack of an expiration date for his authority (almost always<\/a>, when Congress extends the preorgative, it’s been on a temporary basis). “Nonetheless,” Dearborn continued, “while the reorganization authority lawmakers granted FDR in 1939 included some important limits on his powers, the law still relied on legislators’ assumption that a president would be uniquely focused on the good of the nation as a whole when formulating and submitting reorganization plans.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The national culture backing FDR<\/a> was an enormous facilitator of his reorg. plans and legacy. The culture back then was much more unified than today’s extreme polarization, as illustrated by the song “Why I Like Roosevelt,” originally from the 1940s. It’s embedded below as a 1990s-era recording of the elderly Willie Eason playing guitar in the Sacred Steel tradition and singing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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