In defense of a King (sort of)

Why we might actually need a Unitary Executive to fix the economy.

Howdy folks,

Every time Trump takes a swing at the so-called independent parts of the executive branch, the same headline goes up. He’s destroying checks and balances. He’s politicizing independent agencies. He’s turning the presidency into a king.

I get the instinct. Given who’s behind the wheel, panic makes sense. But just because Trump uses a hammer doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. The tool isn’t evil because a bad guy picked it up.

In some really tragic ways we already live under an imperial presidency. We’ve been fine with that for decades, so long as the power was pointed at the right targets.

For fifty years, Congress has handed war-making power to the White House. Presidents launch airstrikes, run drone campaigns, station troops across the globe, destabilize entire regions—all without a declaration of war. Last time Congress formally declared one was 1942. Then there’s the national security state. CIA coups to protect American corporate interests abroad. NSA mass surveillance. Torture programs. Secret legal memos written after the fact to justify whatever already happened.

After 9/11, we pointed that same apparatus inward. Warrantless wiretaps. Bulk data collection on American citizens. Police departments with military equipment and the ability to hijack your cell signal. License plate scanners building databases of everywhere you drive. Fusion centers. No-fly lists you can’t get off of because there’s no due process to challenge.

We were told this was the price of safety. Give up a little freedom, get a little security. The media sold it. Congress funded it. Most Americans accepted it. Nobody in power said wait, this is too much executive authority.

Now look at the parts of the executive branch that manage the domestic economy. The Federal Reserve. Treasury. Department of Labor. The FTC, SEC, NLRB, FDA, EPA. These agencies sit under Article II. Constitutionally, they’re part of the executive branch. They exist to carry out laws at the direction of the president.

We treat them as if they’re a separate fourth branch of government. We’ve built up this whole religion of “independence.” The idea is they should be insulated from politics—meaning from presidents. That also largely means insulated from voters, democracy, and accountability.

But they aren’t independent. Not even a little. They’re captured. By Wall Street. By Big Ag. By Big Pharma. By Big Tech. The revolving door between industry and government has been a disaster. We’ve built institutions that serve the market and not us.

We’re told we need industry experts running these agencies. That if we let presidents control them, we’d be replacing neutral professionals with political hacks. We need a firewall to protect the integrity of the civil service.

To know if that’s working, just look at the outcomes.

The “independent” FDA approved OxyContin and looked the other way while pharmaceutical companies ravaged American communities—knowing exactly how addictive their product was. Exposed in court documents. Exposed in whistleblower testimony. They knew. They approved it anyway. Then watched six hundred thousand people die.

The “independent” EPA allows fracking chemicals in our groundwater that no other developed nation would permit. The Halliburton Loophole exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act entirely. They’ve approved drilling practices that poison aquifers while telling you the water’s fine.

The “independent” SEC watches members of Congress trade stocks on insider information and does nothing. Exposed on 60 Minutes. Exposed in financial disclosures. Everyone knows. Nothing happens.

The danger critics warn about, that these agencies might be captured by bad actors, has already happened. They just weren’t captured by a president. They were captured by the industries they’re supposed to regulate. By pharma. By the Chamber of Commerce. By Wall Street. By the American Medical Association. We’re not defending a system of neutral expertise. We’re defending a system where the capture already occurred and the captors would very much prefer you not notice.

The Federal Reserve is the crown jewel of the “independence” argument. We’re told it must remain independent to ensure price stability. If politicians controlled the money supply, they’d just print money before elections and we’d end up with hyper-inflation.

Here’s what that independence has done for Americans.

Over the last thirty years, the Fed presided over an explosion in the cost of housing, healthcare, childcare, and education—the things that define whether you can build a life in this country. They tell us inflation was low and stable. They achieve that number through a series of statistical manipulations—I detail these in The Cover Up—that mask how much less your dollar buys. Your grocery bill went up. Your rent went up. Your health insurance went up. But the official inflation number stayed low because they assume you’ll substitute chicken for beef and a smaller apartment for a bigger one. They measure your standard of living going down and call it price stability.

My grandparents worked one week for a year of healthcare. We work twelve weeks for the same thing. They earned enough in three years to buy a house outright. Now it takes more than ten. Those lines should be going down as technology improves. They’re going up. Way up. I wrote about this in The Big Pay Cut. That happened on the Fed’s watch. Under their independence.

Meanwhile, they flooded cheap money into asset markets. Stocks, bonds, real estate—all inflated into a bubble that made the wealthy wealthier and turned homeownership into a fantasy for anyone under forty. And when official inflation did spike, the Fed had one tool. Crush workers. Raise interest rates. Increase unemployment. Make people so broke they stop buying things, and “inflation” comes down. But prices don’t. This system doesn’t bring prices down, as I wrote in No Reverse. That’s the whole playbook. When prices rise, make workers poorer until they can’t afford stuff. Then declare victory.

A president who answers to voters, working with Treasury and the Fed, could do the opposite. Attack inflation by building shit instead of making people poor. Build housing. Produce energy. The TVA. The California aqueduct. Build domestic manufacturing. Not just pay for it, not just “invest”—but build the capacity, the buildings, the market. Right now we can’t even have that conversation. Because the Fed is independent. Independent of you and me but not Jamie Dimon.

The Broadway musical skipped over this part, but Hamilton’s First Bank had the government owning 20% of it. The public had a seat at the table. When the government needed to borrow money, it didn’t pay a bunch of middlemen to handle it.

We don’t do it that way anymore. Now when the government borrows money, it goes through two dozen Wall Street banks. They buy the debt, they sell the debt, they take a cut at every step. They do all this with money we give them. If anything goes wrong, we cover the losses.

Americans provide Wall Street parasites with cheap money. They use it to buy our debt. They profit off the transactions. We guarantee the whole thing so they never lose. The house always wins and the house is JPMorgan.

Government could just borrow money and pay interest. Done. Simple. Instead we installed middlemen at every step. Good work if you can get it. We did this to ourselves. Or rather, the people who profit from it did this to us.

Trump’s people want Schedule F. Strip job protections from federal workers so the president can fire anyone. The fear is we go back to the spoils system, where every new president fires everyone and hires their idiot cousins and nothing works.

Fair enough. But the people running these agencies now all went to the same schools. They rotate through the same think tanks and the same banks. They think their job is to keep markets calm. They think wage growth is a problem. They think the economy is healthy when stock prices are up, even if nobody under forty can buy a house.

They’re not captured by a president. They’re captured by each other.

Starting in the New Deal era, Congress figured out a trick. They created agencies inside the executive branch and filled them with people the president can’t fire—or can only fire “for cause.” That means someone within the executive branch can refuse to carry out the president’s agenda and keep their job. If Congress can create executive branch agencies the president doesn’t control, then the executive branch isn’t a co-equal branch. It’s a collection of fiefdoms, each one loyal to its own guild and its own revolving door with industry. If our vote for president doesn’t give that president control over the machinery of economic policy, our vote is worth a lot less than we think.

Meanwhile, the same Congress that stuffed the executive branch with these fiefdoms has completely abandoned its own job. War? Article I says Congress declares it. They haven’t formally done that since 1942. They just let presidents bomb whoever while they sit on the sidelines. The budget? Congress is supposed to control the purse. Instead they lurch from shutdown threat to shutdown threat, then a handful of leaders negotiate a thousand-page omnibus behind closed doors and drop it on members with hours to read before the vote. Trade? Constitutionally a congressional power. They handed it to the executive through fast-track authority, reducing themselves to an up-or-down vote on deals they didn’t negotiate.

Congress grabbed power where the Constitution didn’t give it—stuffing the executive branch with agencies that answer to finance instead of voters—while abandoning power where the Constitution did assign it, because they don’t want accountability for hard votes.

Trump’s people are using real tools. Schedule F. Unitary executive theory. Bringing agencies under direct White House control. These are not authoritarian tools. They’re how you would change the system if you wanted to. Any power can be used for good or for bad. A police force. A military. The executive branch. Without power you can’t accomplish anything. The problem isn’t the power. The problem is what Trump is using it for. Fossil fuel interests. Monopoly power. Culture war. Becoming a real billionaire.

But watch what happens next. Liberals, terrified of Trump, terrified of power, will try to pass laws locking these tools away forever. Protect agency independence at all costs. Make it harder for any president to direct economic policy.

If they succeed, you’ll have a presidency that can blow up pipelines in another country but can’t direct the Department of Energy to build public power in your own. A presidency that can order drone strikes but can’t order the FDA to ban toxic chemicals in your food. A presidency that can run a global surveillance apparatus but can’t tell the Fed to prioritize full employment over Wall Street’s preferences.

The donor class wants exactly that. A strong executive for war and corporate protection. A weak one for everything else.

When you elect a president on an economic agenda, you should be electing someone to run the economic agencies. Not someone who gives speeches while unelected bureaucrats decide your future. A president who controlled the executive branch could direct agencies to break up corporate power, raise unionization rates, use the Defense Production Act for housing and energy and medicine instead of just bombs. Could design bailouts that protect workers first and shareholders last.

Trump accidentally uncovered how much power is sitting there. He’s using it to enrich himself and protect monopolies. The answer isn’t to lock that power away forever. The answer is to point it somewhere useful. At the cartels. At the insurers. At the banks. At the systems that have been selling off your inheritance for fifty years.

If you lock away the tools the moment there’s a chance—just a chance—they might be used for workers instead of wars, you’re not saving democracy. You’re making damn sure it never works for you.

Corbin