The topic of the January 29 NYU Law Forum, held just nine days into the Trump administration, couldn’t have been timelier: the extent of the power of the US president to hire and fire government workers. Professor Noah Rosenblum moderated a discussion among former US Senator Bob Kerrey; Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University; Christina Kinana, an assistant professor of political science at Yale University; and Gregg Nunziata, executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law and former general counsel in the office of Senator Marco Rubio.
Among the issues they explored were whether the president can operate like a CEO, the US Senate’s advice and consent role in confirmation of the president’s nominees for office, the executive branch’s use of acting rather than confirmed appointees, conservatives’ embrace of the unitary executive theory, and the rationale for the existing structure of federal bureaucracy.
“Until recently, if I said I cared about the civil service and we should pay attention to it, it was a surefire way to kill a conversation,” said Rosenblum. “And yet now, of course, it’s really quite a fraught aspect of our politics.”
Selected remarks from the panel discussion:
Bob Kerrey: “There’s no comparison between a CEO and the president of the United States. The president of the United States is Article II of the Constitution. The president doesn’t have a vote on the Hill. Elon Musk doesn’t have a vote on the Hill, thank God. All they can do is recommend. And every single one of his cabinet appointees has 535 elected people on their boards. So if you want to be the head of the [Department of Veterans Affairs], you have to deal with the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is on your board. And other people, you have 535 elected people, 435 in the House, 100 in the Senate, and they’re your board of directors.” (video 07:50)
Christina Kinane: “We often denigrate [civil servants] and are frustrated with the slow pace of government without recognizing that, in fact…slow government is actually what the Founders wanted. They wanted sure energy and decisiveness in the president, and therefore left a singular individual at the top rather than a council or some larger group that would be subject to collective action problems. But they also wanted to ensure precisely why we have separation of powers and why the policymaking process is so fragmented is to ensure that it is slow so that it wouldn’t be subject to the whims of mob rule or factions or the like.” (video 30:02)
Gregg Nunziata: “I don’t want Trump or any president to fill the millions of jobs in the government with political loyalists who we cannot trust to serve the American people. But I also don’t love the stuff you see on Twitter and Reddit by unnamed government career officials talking about how they’re going to work so hard to undermine this president…. The difficulty is…sorting out what’s a policy decision and what’s not. That’s not always clear, but we want government employees to refuse illegal orders, certainly, regardless of how they feel about the president. And we want them to obey lawful instructions from the head of the executive branch when they are lawful.” (video 52:32)
Sarah Binder: “One view is that…the ship of state is really hard to move…[and] it’s hard to see change like that envisioned by Project 2025 and the [Office of Management and Budget] and Trump…. The second view is that Trump is sui generis, that we haven’t had a president—I’m sure there will be disputes about whether Nixon comes close—who doesn’t seem to believe in the rule of law and has a very different view about the Constitution, which is his and his advisors’ right to have about the inordinate power to the executive branch, even to the extent that appropriations and congressional decisions apparently don’t matter. I don’t know where we’re going to end up.” (video 55:40)
Watch the full video of the NYU Law Forum:
Posted February 5, 2025