What You Should Be Reading: February 2025
Taxpayers Protection Alliance
March 3, 2025
Welcome to “What You Should Be Reading,” a monthly series in which the Taxpayers Protection Alliance helps to spread the good news about the latest and most exciting developments in public-policy research.
February’s edition features more on the origins of presidential power, the mathematical realities of Social Security, and — let the people rejoice — the non-delegation doctrine.
American Enterprise Institute: “How Congress Lost, Part V: Politics and Presidential Power Under Adams and Jefferson, 1797–1809”
As What You Should Be Reading has highlighted before, the American Enterprise Institute’s Jay Cost has an excellent series documenting the migration of political power from Congress (where the Framers thought it would reside) to the Presidency (where it now resides). The most recent installment explores presidential power during the tenures of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the first two presidents to hold office without George Washington’s unmatched popularity.
A single energetic official commanding a full branch of government has certain natural advantages over a large, multi-member, multi-house institution such as Congress. The American republic discovered this under President George Washington (see Cost’s Part III), when the agent imposing the administration’s will was Alexander Hamilton. The tendency of Article I to be driven, herded, and strongarmed by Article II became clear from the start.
In the final decade of the 18th century and the first of the 19th, Cost writes, “the presidency had not yet acquired an institutionalized source of political power.” In this time, the Presidency had yet to acquire the vast authorities it holds today; all legislative powers granted by the Constitution were, in fact, vested in Congress. Indeed, “Of Washington’s five successors, only Jefferson entered office with anything approaching that kind of power.” Andrew Jackson seems to lurk between the lines of Cost’s report — just beyond that of Washington’s fifth successor — but his name never appears.
Jefferson carried over to his presidency his status as the Republican party leader, built initially as Washington’s secretary of state. As such, he held sway over Congress’s Republican majorities, strengthened further by a loyal cabinet (an asset John Adams lacked, to say the least). Although, like Washington, his revolutionary exploits gained him a certain reverence, his political effectiveness depended heavily on his sound and shrewd politicking.
Cost reminds his readers that the Presidency is a vessel. The quantity of power it holds at any time depends on the talents, character, and philosophical tendencies of its occupant. The Constitution supplies the president with “the executive power,” and this broadness leaves much latitude for the energetic and effective — e.g., Jackson — while it swallows up others.
The sine qua non to any attempt to cage the executive is a confident, assertive Congress. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Article I must counteract Article II. To rebalance American politics, reformers must reconnect the interests of those on Capitol Hill “with the constitutional rights of the place.” The unsung, gritty work of lawmaking must be made once again to seem more fruitful than the plumage of cable news, the lists of Twitter, and the offering of fealty to the man in the White House.
Cato Institute: “Congress Can’t Outgrow or Inflate Away the Social Security Financing Problem”
Fiscally irresponsible politicians, like middle schoolers, hate math. Math is exacting. Its conclusions doggedly persist irrespective of anybody’s thoughts and feelings about them.
Math clearly relates a few simple truths: the federal government’s current activities require outlays that far exceed revenue; this spending stems primarily from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — the costliest federal programs; and if this spending — and the concomitant debt and deficits — continues unreformed, the federal government will find itself in a fiscal crisis.
Math also dictates that America cannot, in fact, “outgrow or inflate away” Social Security’s impending insolvency, according to a new report from the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett. “Inflation automatically drives benefit increases, as Social Security benefits are adjusted to account for changes in prices per current law,” the write. “Even with strong wage growth, payroll tax revenues will not keep pace with the cost of rising benefits, as current law also mandates that new benefits increase in accordance with wage growth.”
Social Security’s woes weave themselves into the tapestry of America’s fiscal and economic woes. Incontinent spending creates debt, which creates “the crowd-out effect, where government borrowing displaces more productive private-sector investments,” write Boccia and Lett. This shrinks economic growth and dynamism, accelerating entitlement programs’ decline. The authors report that “accounting for the economic effects of debt crowd-out results in a much worse financial outlook for Social Security than the trustees currently expect.” One study “projected that Social Security’s annual cash-flow shortfall in 2048 would be 77 percent larger than the trustees projected due to debt crowd-out effects.”
Math does not dictate how, precisely, entitlement reform should occur. However, it makes clear that lawmakers’ current apathy towards incontinent spending cannot go forward, except at great cost.
Amici in Brief: Why the Universal Service Fund is Unconstitutional
In America, policy aims can be pursued only within procedural bounds dictated by the Constitution. No matter how sound a lawmaker’s concept, a constitutional failing in implementation can — and, when the system functions properly, will — prove fatal.
The Constitution vests various powers in the three branches of the federal government and disallows the branches from trading or swapping them. Enumerated legislative powers must remain with the legislature, the executive power with the executive, and the judicial power with judges. “…shall be vested,” read the first sections of Articles I, II, III (emphasis added).
Today, the river of delegation runs most often from legislative to executive. Article I powers flow from Capitol Hill to the administrative office buildings littered around Washington, D.C. They commonly arrive at “independent agencies,” a constitutionally fictitious innovation of the Progressive Era.
Congress violated the non-delegation principle in establishing the Universal Service Fund (USF), administered by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), argues TechFreedom in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court. Congress in 1996 established the USF to subsidize communications services. Yet as the brief explains:
In creating the USF, Congress handed the [FCC] open-ended power to define what services should be “universal,” to set the amount of private-sector money (ultimately, consumer money) the government will collect to promote those services, and to determine how the money is spent.
Worse still, the FCC then doubled down on delegation, entrusting the USF’s operations to the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), a private entity — all without Congress’s direction or approval. “[P]rivate delegation is also worse than intra-government delegation in a key way,” TechFreedom argues. “Both an executive agency and a private regulator might, at least in theory, be structured so as to promote caution, deliberation, care for minority interests, and accountability. But when lawmaking power is delegated to a private party, any semblance of representative governance is lost.”
America is a republic, “a government of laws, not of men,” as John Adams put it. The law in question is clear: the USF’s double delegation is doubly deserving of the Supreme Court’s opprobrium.
Note: TPA highlights research projects that contribute meaningfully to important public-policy discussions. TPA does not necessarily endorse the policy recommendations the featured authors make.