Alternatively, the renewal of the EPA or the FTC or the FDA would be filibustered and agencies would stop existing, leading to rivers catching on fire and snake oil salesmen using deceptive ads.
I don't see the problem here. If the society is so fractured that they can't agree on having agencies to protect against burning rivers and the like, then the society shouldn't have those agencies.
that's a nice consistent sentiment, but not necessarily useful
if there's consensus then bad laws can be changed, or good ones extended, or the filibuster removed, etc. so why have them auto-expire anyway? (see the Patriot act, got extended without much fuss.)
it would make hiring people to these agencies uniquely challenging, and it wouldn't solve much of anything. (it's a typical libertarian-ish idea, without the usual props required to make these workable, eg. a society that favors cooperation, prefers to adapt their life to meet their goals, eg. like-minded folks moving en masse to make their own life much better, and also getting out of the way of others, instead of what usually happens, which is local groups fighting tooth and nail against any change that would inconvenience them)
>if there's consensus then bad laws can be changed, or good ones extended, or the filibuster removed, etc. so why have them auto-expire anyway?
The auto-expire thing is a good idea; it's basically automatic garbage collecting. It's a procedure which forces the legislature to review every old law to see if it needs updating or renewal or not. Many laws are old and forgotten, because the legislature isn't forced (by its own auto-expire procedure) to review these old laws, and then they eventually cause problems because some lawyer digs them up and applies them to a case.
The Patriot Act got extended without fuss because it had lots of bipartisan support. You may disagree with the Act, but almost all the congresspeople liked it (and they were elected or re-elected by the voters), so it's correct that it was extended.
If the EPA doesn't enjoy that level of support, or even enough support for Congress to re-authorize it every so often, then it should be abolished. Sure, that will result in disaster (burning rivers and the like), but if that's what the People want, that's what they should get, unless you think the government should be replaced with an authoritarian system.
You may think the EPA and environmental protection is important, but you share a country with a huge number of uneducated morons who don't, and their vote is just as valid as yours.
> The Patriot Act got extended without fuss because it had lots of bipartisan support
It wasn’t bipartisan. Witness what happened when Max Cleland - a senator who loss three limbs in Vietnam - was accused of being “unpatriotic” for not supporting the Iraq War
That’s not quite accurate. Specific provisions from the original act, fewer each time, were extended.
> It contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions.[3] These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015.[4] In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives, and as such, the law has expired.[5]
If Congress cannot pass laws to deal with current problems because of gridlock and the filibuster, you think putting more items on their plate will help?
But the FDA just issued new rules around PFAS this year and tens of billions were allocated to upgrade water plants to prevent contamination in that omnibus spending bill that just passed. Why do you ask?
> you think putting more items on their plate will help
Not GP, but I think it would stress the system to the breaking point and force us to fix it. I strongly suspect this would actually be a good thing. If a periodic process is painful for an organization in many cases doing it more frequently will result in the problems being fixed.
There is clearly significant disagreement in the US over the desirable scope of federal powers. Forcing that issue to a head would hopefully result in a more functional system in the end.
