This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 4th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President has, with the complicity of Congress become enormously powerful.

In one arena, emergency powers, there may be some appetite for finally

reigning in the chief executive's automatic and often open-ended assumption of

new authorities in the face of a temporary

emergency. Satyatholums with Americans for responsible innovation.

He spoke recently in the Senate with Cato's own Jean Healy on the importance of curtailing emergency executive

authority. I spoke with Thalum last week. I don't know the degree to which you view this as a problem but Congress seems to like to hand powers to the executive.

And you can sort of understand the incentives at work there.

Things go well.

We did this.

Things go poorly.

Oh, how badly he worked with the authorities that we gave him we don't

trust this person anymore and a lot of these are contingent on who's in the White House. And when it comes to

emergencies, we want to be able to move swiftly. We want to be able to take action to

help people who are dealing with whatever that emergency might be.

So Congress hands over decades, lots and lots of authority to the executive branch to undertake swift action in the event of an

emergency. How has that worked? Has that has it been effective or how might we fix that program?

Yeah, well on your first point, I think you hit it on the head.

In a broader context, Congress has been delegating an increasing amount of authority and I'll give

you a little inside view during my time working in Congress.

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