Politics
/
February 21, 2025
A recent order aimed at destroying independent regulatory agencies isn’t just about taking control of the state—it’s a giant cash-grab in disguise.
The orders and actions of Donald Trump and his copresident Elon Musk are all part of a piece. The most obvious goal is to establish authoritarian, single-party control in the United States of America, and we know that because they wrote down their plan in Project 2025 and have been executing that plan every day since they took office. But we should understand why they want such power.
It’s not just so they can win the culture wars; Trump and Musk are misogynists and provable racists, but their hatred of women and Black people (and gay people and trans people and Latino people and Muslim people and truth and science and journalism and fact-based reality) are all just their means to an end. The thing Trump and Musk value most of all is money. Their entire regime is best understood as a criminal junta whose end goal is to redirect the wealth of the nation into their own pockets. They are running a kleptocracy, and they’ve figured out that facism is actually the quickest path to riches. They’re the encapsulation of Alan Rickman’s portrayal of Hans Gruber, the villain in Die Hard, taken to its logical conclusion. They talk like megalomaniacal populists, but they’re really just common thieves—or, well, exceptional thieves, given their success rate.
If you understand the thievery that underpins this entire administration, you’ll understand that Trump’s recent executive order aimed at destroying independent regulatory agencies is an essential part of the overall plot. Independent regulatory agencies are things like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Elections Commission. These institutions were set up by Congress and are made up of commissioners appointed by the president. They are authorized to promote regulations over the industries and business sectors they oversee. They are the parts of the federal government most businesses interact with. They are the only real day-to-day check on unrestrained capitalism in our system of government.
Predictably, Trump and Musk want to destroy them, and the executive order accomplishes that by mandating that every single one of the agencies’ regulations and proposals must be routed through the Office of Management and Budget. That may sound like a bunch of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, but what it means is that these independent agencies will no longer be “independent.” It means that every single regulation in the country—from what disclosures have to be made to shareholders to how much broken glass is allowed to be in your childrens’ toys—are subject to the whims of the president, and the president alone. No hearings, no panel of experts, no opportunity for public comment—it’ll just be Donald Trump and a Sharpie deciding which regulations he feels like getting rid of today. And when Trump is too lazy or busy with his golf outings to do the work, it will fall to OMB director Russell Vought, who is literally the guy who came up with Project 2025.
For the kleptocrats, this order is their Holy Grail. It’s something they’ve been trying to do since Ronald Reagan’s administration. But for a lot of people who don’t understand what government does or how it works, getting rid of independent agencies doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, it’s extremely popular. Elon Musk has been running his mouth on his social media platform, railing against “unelected bureaucrats” (which is the height of hypocrisy given that he is now an unelected bureaucrat). He tells people that these bureaucrats slow down business and “innovation” with needless red tape. It’s an argument that almost always works on a certain kind of person, because most people dislike filling out forms and interacting with the government and generally having to ask permission before they do whatever it is they can think of to make a buck. We are a nation of grifters, run by grifters, and regulatory agencies only get in the way of the next pyramid scheme.
I, however, think of regulatory agencies the way I think of crossing guards. A traffic light is the law passed by Congress, but the independent agencies are the crossing guards who can be deployed at peak times or during unexpected emergencies. They are, often, inefficient, and it is frustrating as hell to be stuck behind one as they stare at you with their open palm up in the air. It’s easy to say “we should get rid of crossing guards and automate all of our traffic issues.” The problem is that I do not trust the average Cyber-Cuck driver to not barrel through a field-trip worth of kids on their way home from school. The kinds of people who support Trump are exactly the kinds of people who will ignore road signs and speed limits. They’re the kinds of people who regard a “children at play” sign as an affront to their freedom, and so we need to have crossing guards who can tell these people “no.”
Current Issue
Trump’s executive order is aimed at incapacitating these governmental crossing guards, for the obvious reason that they are the only things stopping the owner class from making even more money. The tell that this order is all about making these rich people even richer is the one exception to the order: It excludes the Federal Reserve Board. The Fed is in charge of monetary policy (interest rates, mainly), which means it has a lot of say about the value of money itself. Taking away the independence of the Fed would, likely, send the markets into a spiral. That move would cost Trump and his donors money. And so he says the Fed will be spared.
To be clear, there’s no legal or constitutional reason to exempt the Federal Reserve while going after the other agencies. There’s no intellectual framework that can justify removing the independence of the SEC but not the Fed. It simply doesn’t make sense, unless you understand that the SEC costs Trump’s owner class money, while the Fed protects it. Following the money is the only way to square this circle.
The most distressing thing about this order is that Trump has other, more traditional ways of smashing the regulatory state that he could use to accomplish many of the same goals. As I mentioned, the regulatory agencies are controlled by commissioners appointed by the president. Trump could just appoint commissioners who share his smash-and-grab philosophy. He could also fire commissioners, although he’s not technically allowed to do so without cause, and has already attempted to fire a bunch who he does not think will do what he wants. Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board, who happens to be Black, without citing a cause. The dismissal created a momentary inability for the NLRB to produce a quorum; Jeff Bezos tried to drive Whole Foods right through that gap and de-unionize one of his businesses. Wilcox has since sued to keep her job, but Trump will probably win that lawsuit because the Supreme Court likes to give Trump the powers of a king.
For a time, I couldn’t figure out why Trump went with the executive order to force these agencies to beg Vought for their right to exist, when firing people seemed to be the easiest way of accomplishing the same mission. Luckily, I have very smart friends, and they alerted me to the fact that, unlike in the case of the Wilcox firing, there is likely nobody who has standing to sue Trump over this executive order.
To have standing to sue over an executive action, you have to be able to show that the action has harmed you in some way. In this instance, it’s going to be very difficult to prove that Trump’s decision to take away the power of independent agencies is the proximate cause of anybody’s harm. If the SEC doesn’t issue a regulation, who is harmed? Even if you can argue that a corporate action taken in the absence of regulations harmed people, surely the entity that caused the harm is the corporation, not the SEC that failed to issue a regulation, or the president who changed the way regulations are issued.
The only body that would have standing to sue over this executive order is… Congress. Congress set up the independent agencies, and it is the entity that is harmed when the president does not let them function. Unfortunately, as you might have noticed, Congress is currently run by a group of Republicans with their heads so far up Trump’s ass they can taste his Big Macs. There will be no lawsuit coming from this Congress to protect its constitutional powers, at least not in the next two years.
But even if Democrats take control of Congress in 2026, a lawsuit against this executive order will almost certainly fail at the Supreme Court. That’s because the Republicans who control the Supreme Court have become enamored by the gospel of the “unitary executive.” That authoritarian trope masquerading as a legal doctrine holds that literally everybody who works in the executive branch of government serves at the pleasure of the president and can be hired, fired, or reorganized on the president’s whim. Republicans on the court do not believe that an “independent regulatory agency” should be allowed to exist. Trump’s Supreme Court will not restore the power of the SEC or the FTC, and since Trump is leaving the Fed alone (for now), it’s unlikely that Harlan Crow’s justices will balk at the executive order either.
All of which means, I’m pretty sure Trump is going to get away with this one. Like I said, they are exceptional thieves.
And this is where I remind you that Joe Biden never fired “independent commissioner” and postal chief Louie DeJoy. This is where I remind you that Biden never fired Chris Wray, “independent” FBI director and buddy of alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh. This is also where I remind you that Democrats are always playing by a set of rules Republicans feel free to ignore.
The power Trump arrogates to himself now can, should, and must be used by a Democratic president should one ever be allowed to be elected again. The institutions are dead. Trump killed them. Instead of resurrecting them, Democrats must use their power maximally, just as Trump is doing now.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
Of course, the idea that Democrats will ever hold power again seems more like a foolish hope than a political inevitably. As I said, one of the organizations Trump wants to bring under his thumb with this executive order is the FEC—and with it the keys to how federal elections are run in this country. Taking partisan control of the FEC is thievery of another sort: It’s not stealing money; it’s stealing entire elections.
The people will need to rise up and take back from Trump the power that they gave him, but it’s hard to imagine anyone going to the mattresses to protect independent regulatory agencies. I’d bet that nobody in history has ever been motivated to take a police baton to their head to protect “The Bureaucrats.” Most Americans will not appreciate what is being lost until it is already long gone.
But people will suffer. Unregulated, unrestrained, smash-and-grab capitalism always leads to suffering. The question, as always, is how much pain white folks are willing to endure before they turn on their political and corporate overlords. And I fear that the answer is “more.”
