This is the Cater Daily podcast for Monday, February 17, 2025.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If Doge, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, wants its highlighting of questionable federal spending to achieve some enduring result,

and as important as anything, abide by the separation of powers built

into the Constitution.

The agency needs Congress.

Gene Healy explains why.

Within the president's purview are a lot of things.

And Donald Trump, in his first few weeks in office, has done a lot of things that seem clearly outside the purview of, at least exclusively, the president of the United States.

Well, there are a lot of things that are within the president's purview now that were never intended to be.

So some of this isn't new.

In other ways, he is aggressively pushing the envelope on executive power.

But I think it's important to take a broader look at it.

You know, in this town, the political press and the political class,

they tend to, you know, evaluate is energy or energy in the executive? Is that a good or bad thing?

And the way they evaluated, it tends to be, well, it depends on who's getting zapped, you know,

whether it's a red team or the blue team. I think as libertarians, we should take a more principled

and dispassionate view. So there are executive orders in the current onslaught that concern me.

There are executive orders that I think were to the good and perfectly lawful.

And there were, you know, there's a mix of good, bad, and the ugly.

You mentioned energy in the executive.

That's Federalist 70, I believe.

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