From The NYTimes:
President Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that seeks greater authority over regulatory agencies that Congress established as independent from direct White House control, part of a broader bid to centralize a president’s power over the government.
The order requires independent agencies to submit their proposed regulations to the White House for review, asserts a power to block such agencies from spending funds on projects or efforts that conflict with presidential priorities, and declares that they must accept the president’s and the Justice Department’s interpretation of the law as binding.
You can read the White House's fact sheet on the EO here.
More from The Times:
The directive applies to various executive branch agencies that Congress established and empowered to regulate aspects of the economy, structuring them to be run by officials the president would appoint to fixed terms but whose day-to-day actions he would not directly control.
And:
Ending the independence of such agencies and consolidating power over them in the White House has long been an aim of the conservative legal movement, which sees that goal as a means toward reducing regulations and rules the government has imposed on powerful business interests.
But the movement has lacked the votes to persuade Congress to simply rescind the statutes and abolish or curtail such agencies. Instead, since the Reagan administration, conservative lawyers have developed and pushed an ideology called the unitary executive theory, under which the Constitution should be reinterpreted as not allowing Congress to create any pockets of independence within the government from direct presidential control.
Ah, the Unitary Executive Theory.
Where are the originalists, those guardians of Constitutional orthodoxy regarding Trump's power grab?
At least he wasn't putting mustard on a cheeseburger.
