Thank you to Vicki Marzullo @ Lew Rockwell.

3:00. Interesting constitutional question so I have to go back to 1883 and the Pendleton Act and talk about 

3:12.  In 1883, we have some discussion about civil service reform.  Why?  In 1881, we have the assassination of President James Garfield.  So he's walking in a train station, and a disgruntled office figure named Charles Guiteau shoots him in the back.  He doesn't die right then; he'll die later on horribly from infection because they're trying to find the bullet, and they kept digging around in his back.  When Guiteau  shoots Garfield, he says, "I am a stalwart of the stalwarts."  Arthur is president now, and what did that mean?  In the 1880s in New York, you had political factions vying for the spoils of the presidency.  Now at that time there were a shade over 100,000 federal jobs in the United States, and the party in charge of the executive Branch appointed all of these people the president actually made $100,000 appointments or at least he delegated that out to subordinates who appointed people it wasn't any civil service the executive branch turned over every time a new president came in all of them including things like postmasters all of that turned over you could have a new postmaster every 4 years because the postmasters were appointed by the president and this was very effective for the Republican Party during the war by the way because they would put Republican postmasters so they could control the Postal Service, they could search the mail and other things.  We had all of these appointed people.  Well, Guiteau didn't get a job, and so he thought he was going to take it out on the president.  He shot the president and killed him.  At that point, Chester Arthur becomes president.  Chester Arthur was a stalwart.  There were two factions.  One were the stalwarts, one where the half breeds.  The stalwarts were purely party men.  If you were not a Republican, if you were not someone who toed the line, the Republican Party line, you were not going to get a job.  The Half-Breeds, like James Garfield, believed in hiring Democrats at times.  They didn't really have to be a Republican; he wanted the best man for the job.  These were the reconciliationists.  You saw this when you got to a period after the war where there was some insistence that some Democrats were brought into the fold, or at least some Southerners.  These were people that were thinking, "Well, we need to reunify the United States.  Let's put some things back together." So, after Garfield was killed, there was an outcry for civil service reform.  "We've got to get rid of the spoils system.  It's a problem."  So that led to the Pendleton Act of 1883 Chester Arthur was behind it so was most of the American population but even at that point with well over 100,000 workers only about 10% were covered by the Pendleton Act still there were a lot of people that worked as civil service employees that we're going to be hired instead of political appointees only about 10%, so you're looking at what 13,000 people.  the rest were still Federal appointees.  You could see how small the federal government was at that point if only 10% were covered by civil service.  Most of the people were not.  That means the president still appointed all these people.  Now, today we have a federal workforce of around 3 million people, 3 million people.  Unprecedented.  3 million people.  What D.O.G.E. is finding out is that most people don't do any work. They simply get a salary, and it's corrupt and fraudulent, and everything else is graft.  All of it.  But all of those people are covered by the Civil Service law except for the President [who] appoints such a small percentage of the federal workforce now.  That is almost all of the 2.9 million people.  I can't remember if that number includes military people or not.  I don't think it includes that.  To cover the soldiers, there is a million of those.  So now you've got almost 4 million people who are on federal service, and when you're broaden it out further when you look at people who are on the door who get money from federal contracts Federal money it's a huge number millions and millions of people are getting federal dollars in one way or another.  So we have this interesting situation that has developed since 1883 where the president has become completely hamstrung to control the executive branch.  In 1883, the president controlled all of it.  In 1882 the president controlled every higher in the executive branch there were 130,000 of them.  Today, the president controls very few.  So we've gotten 180° in the other direction.  People complained in 1883 that the President had too much control.  But it only covered 10% of the federal workforce, so they were still fine with the president getting everything else.  So what happened?  Over time it was that people decided that who wanted bigger and more bureaucracy, and that the president didn't need to have control over these people however in the 1880s when you go back and look at how some of what the president said about this.  The Pendleton Act itself actually had all kinds of rules and regulations.  One of the things was that you couldn't be overly political.  You couldn't be forced to do something for political reasons but you couldn't take money you couldn't do anything political but now we know the federal workers do this all the time. And when Grover Cleveland became president, he actually set out some rules.  You had to be a US citizen to be in the Civil Service, all these things.  The Civil Service Commission made recommendations.  One of the things was that you couldn't show up intoxicated.  Regardless we had a civil service that covered very few people and even as it expanded out the president had a lot of power over who could be hired and fired even there under civil service.  So this is the vesting clause, the vesting clause.  The president is the head of the executive Department and because of the vesting clause if you want to read it broadly it just means that he has the powers vested and him through the Constitution of only the things listed there but these people that are in favor of extensive executive power they said the vesting Clause means that anything that would be executive is invested in the president, not the Congress, not the Supreme Court.  They have no control over it.  Separation of powers, and the president has the authority to do these things.  He has the authority to appoint, for example, Elon Musk, and create this DOGE committee to go and review the waste in government and make recommendations, which the president can then implement.  He has the power in the vesting clause to fire people who are not doing their job.  He's the president of the United States.  Or his secretaries have the power to fire people because they're not doing their job.  This was a big issue during Reconstruction.  Could the president of the United States fire the commander, the General in Chief of the US Army?  The Congress said no, the president said yes.  This has now been litigated out and this is under the administration of Andrew Johnson and the courts have decided that, yeah, the President can fire the General in Chief ;we call him the Joint Chiefs of Staff now, but they can do it.  The president can fire these people he can also hire these people even if Congress has a role in hiring them the president can still fire them because they're not doing their job Congress doesn't have to have any role in that so that vesting Clause actually allowed a broad interpretation of it for Franklin Roosevelt to use the executive branch to transform the government in the 1930s.  Also Woodrow Wilson has set the stage for that in the 19-teens, but really Franklin Roosevelt did it more than anyone else.  And essentially what has happened since the 1930s is that we've seen a massive expansion of federal power through the bureaucracy, because that's what Roosevelt did.  He created a fifth column.  He created a bureaucracy that was unmovable.  He knew exactly what he was doing and he talks about it we have all these people people working in government and really when this is over when World War II was over the United States just rearranged the deck chairs and they just kept all of the stuff in place.  So we kept the massive bureaucracy in place.  We kept all the things in place that he was doing, supposedly to win the war, win the war on poverty, the war on depression, win the war in Europe.  Truman just came in and rearranged the deck chairs, and we kept this in place so really no one alive today remembers what it was like before this even if you were old enough to remember World War II there are still some people alive and their 90s that could remember that you really don't remember what it was like before that if you were 18 in World War II at the end of World War II you're in your mid 90s now so you might somewhat remember a time but you really don't remember anything before the 1930s when Roosevelt became president so you don't really remember anything about this we've had three generations of people now essentially who have been brought up under a system, a Roosevelt-type system, an American fascist system, that's what it is.  And so all Trump is doing is going in and doing something with this stuff but using the same powers that Roosevelt claim he had in the 1930s.