President Bannon Is Laying the Groundwork for Destroying the Executive Branch

Are you one of the 13 remaining people on this planet who believes that President Trump is actually calling the shots in his administration, instead of merely serving as a tweet-happy puppet of White House chief strategist and Joseph McCarthy fanboy Steve Bannon? If so, the executive order signed on Monday, the "Comprehensive Plan for Reorganizing the Executive Branch," might just be the straw that breaks the eternally optimistic, hopelessly naïve camel's back. (At least this executive order doesn't attempt to ban a religious group from the United States. Silver linings, I guess.)

The directive's stated goal is to improve the "efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability" of federal agencies, which sounds innocuous enough. However, it proposes some rather, um, extreme measures for attaining those ends, including axing agency components, merging them with one another, or even—if a forthcoming review reveals redundancies or inefficiencies—eliminating agencies altogether. In an inadvertently hilarious photo opp, Trump signed the order surrounded by members of his cabinet—in other words, a few of the people whose jobs his directive places in jeopardy. I'm so happy to have you here as my Secretary of Education, Ms. DeVos. I look forward to hearing whether your colleagues believe that your department should even exist.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with trying to clear up inefficiencies in the federal government, of which I would guess that there are...several. However, this isn't just any presidential administration making a standard post-inauguration show of rolling out the Bobs in an effort to try and save taxpayer a few million dollars. This White House is helmed by a man who has pledged to "destroy the administrative state" during his tenure in office. (Bannon said that, not Trump. But, again, you know who's in charge.) The order is a clever workaround to congressional opposition to those "historic" cuts that the administration troublingly proposed. Congress might balk at draconian slash-and-burn budgeting to housing subsidies and environmental regulation, but it loses that power if the agencies that administer those programs don't exist in the first place.

The broad, septic-sounding language may seem vague to the point of toothlessness, but that's exactly why it's so troubling: In the name of "efficiency," the executive order gives carte blanche to the White House to delegitimize, defund, or destroy any executive branch component it doesn't like. This directive isn't a pair of good-government pruning shears. It's a buzzsaw.