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The Biden administration invoked the Defense Production Act and used $250m of IRA funds to increase production of grid transformers. Guess what happened when Trump took office.


It got reversed because executive action is a stupid way to make policy?


Yah it was an extremely foolish and short sighted EO by Trump, and the country will pay for it for a long time.


This reads like you just desperately wanted to criticize, but couldn't really be troubled to research the background for a minute or two.

The IRA was a law passed by Congress. It set aside funds for grid upgrades, but did give some latitude to the President to deal with crises, because it was understood that Congress couldn't move quickly enough to deal with sudden supply issues. One thing that happened was the investments into grid upgrades created a demand shock, and transformer pricing and timelines surged upwards. So at that point the President invoked the DPA and used a chunk of IRA funding to try to unsnarl the transformer pipeline so the rest of the project could proceed. Then Trump (for basically arbitrary reasons) decided to screw it up. (He's also screwed it up in ways that probably just plain violate the law, but he doesn't care about that either -- which is why "run policy purely from the Legislative branch" doesn't fix any of this.)

Given the context -- a broad law duly passed by the slower legislative branch, a crisis dealt with (according to the law) by the more nimble Executive branch -- I am struggling to make your criticism sound reasonable, even with the absolute maximal dose of charity. This is basically the kind of governance that we want a functioning Legislative and Executive branch to engage in; it was screwed up on purpose; and your proposed solution/excuse does not produce better outcomes.


> I am struggling to make your criticism sound reasonable

It's pretty straightforward...

> but did give some latitude to the President to deal with crises

All the President needs to do is say it's not a crisis. If you want it to stick past the current administration, pass a law after the crisis.

Anything that's at the discretion of the executive is at the desretion of the executive. I'm not saying it's great or smart but there's zero reason to be surprised and I'll not be surprised when a bunch of Trump's orders get reversed too.




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