Congress delegates far too much power to regulators, a Wall Street Journal editorial laments, passing ambiguous laws that convert the agencies into quasi-legislative bodies that aren’t politically accountable. So, what we need, it asserts, is a bill that would require Congress to approve major regulations.
Foseti argues that we need to make the bureaucracy accountable some other way:
To make something accountable it must be accountable to a responsible body that exercises authority. Congress is not such a body. Making something responsible to a body without any willingness to exercise power is a contradiction in terms.
In addition, the bureaucracy already controls Congress. The reason that the statutes are so vague now is because the bureaucracy writes them (your humble blogger has written many pages of at least one of the bills mentioned in the article). We already make Congress dance, it would barely slow us down if we had to make them dance an extra step.
The purpose of any such reforms should be to make the bureaucracy accountable. Making it possible to fire some of us would be a good start. If Congress tied our funding to the success of our regulations, I think you’d see an immediate spike in the quality of regulations. Making the agencies legally liable for crappy regulations would also be quite interesting.
Of course, none of this will happen. An unaccountable bureaucracy is a pillar of the progressive society — perhaps it’s the pillar. The courts would, therefore, find any change to the status quo to be unconstitutional.