Can The Separation Of Powers In The Federal Government Be Righted?

Probably, somewhere in high school or even junior high school, you learned about the "separation of powers" in the U.S. Constitution.  There are legislative, executive and judicial powers, each assigned to a separate branch of the government.  There are "checks and balances" between and among the branches.  Thus, our freedoms are preserved.  Or so we are taught.

But if you study the U.S. government today, you quickly learn about vast areas of the government that have somehow broken free of the separation of powers.  I'm talking about the so-called "independent" agencies, like the FTC, FCC, SEC, CFPB, CFTC, CPSC, PCAOB and others.  These agencies are not explicitly part of any of the three branches, yet they promulgate thousands of pages of regulations (legislative power?), and then prosecute people and companies for violating the regulations (executive power?) before administrative judges (judicial power?) who are part of the agency rather than part of the court system.  Where is this provided for in the Constitution?

The answer is that all of this is entirely unconstitutional.  The Constitution provides for exclusive grants of the three types of power to the three branches of the government, and to no one outside that structure.  (Article I: "All legislative Powers" are "vested" in the "Congress"; Article II: "The executive Power" is "vested" in the "President"; and Article III: "The judicial Power" is "vested" in the federal courts.)  But the Supreme Court, in one of the most bizarre decisions in its history -- Humphrey's Executor in 1935 -- signed off on at least one aspect of the independent agency structure.  Given that little opening, the independent agencies, with the blessing of Congress, have proceeded to metastasize like a cancer ever since.

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected President, Humphrey was a Commissioner of the FTC, having been appointed for a seven-year term by prior President Hoover.  The FTC Act provided (and still provides today) that a Commissioner could be removed by the President for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office."  Roosevelt asked Humphrey to resign, but not explicitly for any of those reasons; rather, Roosevelt just wanted the agency to take a different tack than it had taken under Hoover.  Humphrey refused to resign.  By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, Humphrey had died, and the entire case was about his estate suing for pay for the period from his refusal to resign to his death.  The government's position was that since all executive power of the government was held by the President, the President could demand the resignation of anyone he wanted.  But the Supreme Court upheld Humphrey's refusal to resign -- on the ground that the FTC was not under the President's authority because it did not hold or exercise any executive power!  After describing the FTC's functions as including investigating and prosecuting violations of the FTC Act, the Court set forth this incomprehensible logic:

The Federal Trade Commission is an administrative body created by Congress to carry into effect legislative policies embodied in the statute in accordance with the legislative standard therein prescribed, and to perform other specified duties as a legislative or as a judicial aid. Such a body cannot in any proper sense be characterized as an arm or an eye of the executive. Its duties are performed without executive leave, and, in the contemplation of the statute, must be free from executive control. In administering the provisions of the statute in respect of "unfair methods of competition" -- that is to say, in filling in and administering the details embodied by that general standard -- the commission acts in part quasi-legislatively and in part quasi-judicially. In making investigations and reports thereon for the information of Congress under 6, in aid of the legislative power, it acts as a legislative agency. Under § 7, which authorizes the commission to act as a master in chancery under rules prescribed by the court, it acts as an agency of the judiciary. To the extent that it exercises any executive function -- as distinguished from executive power in the constitutional sense -- it does so in the discharge and effectuation of its quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial powers, or as an agency of the legislative or judicial departments of the government.

Got that?  If you somehow think that "carrying into effect legislative policies embodied in a statute" is the very essence of executive power, then I guess you just need to go to re-education camp.  And what about the idea that if the powers exercised by the agency are not executive, then they must be some combination of legislative and/or judicial, and therefore equally illegitimate?  The Court has the answer:  These are neither "legislative" nor "judicial" powers, because they are only "quasi-legislative" and "quasi-judicial" powers!  No problem then!  And how are we mere humans supposed to tell the difference between "legislative" and "judicial" powers on the one hand, and "quasi-legislative" and "quasi-judicial" powers on the other?  You won't find that answer here.  And yes, this is the entire basis on which the government has claimed the ability for four-fifths of a century to defeat the constitutional separation of powers, and transfer unaccountable executive, legislative and judicial powers all to the same people.

Remarkably, in the eighty-one years since this decision, Humphrey's Executor has never come up for serious reconsideration.  From time to time in the past couple of decades there has been the lonely voice of Justice Clarence Thomas pointing out the obvious illegitimacy of exercise of federal power outside of the three authorized branches, most notably in his recent concurrence in Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads in 2015.  But somehow, a frontal assault on the agencies has been avoided.

Which brings me to the perhaps equally bizarre decision a couple of months ago of the D.C. Circuit, per Judge Kavanaugh, in PHH Corp. v. Consumer Financial Protection Board.  The CFPB initiated a prosecution against PHH, which ended with an order from the CFPB for PHH to pay $109 million.  PHH challenged the authority of the CFPB under the constitutional structure of the government, for example in being free from control of the President by reason of the protections afforded the Director from being fired, as well as being free from Congress's power of the purse by reason of having a funding stream from the Federal Reserve.  The D.C. Circuit held the structure of the CFPB to be unconstitutional, but on the narrow ground that the CFPB has a sole Director, as opposed to the multi-commissioner structure of the other "independent" agencies like the FTC, FCC, SEC, etc.: 

The CFPB’s concentration of enormous executive power in a single, unaccountable, unchecked Director not only departs from settled historical practice, but also poses a far greater risk of arbitrary decision-making and abuse of power, and a far greater threat to individual liberty, than does a multi-member independent agency. The overarching constitutional concern with independent agencies is that the agencies are unchecked by the President, the official who is accountable to the people and who is responsible under Article II for the exercise of executive power. Recognizing the broad and unaccountable power wielded by independent agencies, Congresses and Presidents of both political parties have therefore long endeavored to keep independent agencies in check through other statutory means.  In particular, to check independent agencies, Congress has traditionally required multi-member bodies at the helm of every independent agency.

Fair enough.  But nothing in Humphrey's Executor relied upon the multi-commissioner structure of the FTC as part of the logic to save the agency.  If an agency violates the three-branch structure of the Constitution, then why isn't that the end of the matter, and of the agency?  

I suppose one way of looking at PHH is that the D.C. Circuit is bound to follow the precedents of the Supreme Court, so Kavanaugh could not challenge Humphrey's Executor.  Therefore, he came up with the most absurd possible reason for distinguishing Humphrey's Executor, thus making an obvious invitation to the Supreme Court to do the right thing when the case inevitably gets there.

So is there any chance that the basic principles of the separation of powers will get righted over the next several years?  I kind of doubt that President-elect Trump is even aware of this issue.   On the other hand, you can be sure that the current "liberal" wing of the Supreme Court is completely OK with the idea of completely autonomous and unaccountable federal agencies not subject to any sort of control or oversight.  And any nomination of Hillary Clinton to the Court would have been OK with that as well.  Trump?  He might even nominate Kavanaugh!  Or Randy Barnett!  Or Eugene Volokh!  You never know. 

Christmas Trees In New York

The famous Christmas tree in New York is of course the one at Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan.  But there are some other good Christmas trees around town as well.  Here are a few located in the Downtown area (south of 14th Street).  The first one is on Broad Street, just south of Wall Street.  The building on the left with the row of Corinthian columns is the New York Stock Exchange.  Can you spot the statue of George Washington, standing on the very spot where he took the oath of office in 1789 as the first President of the United States?

Fifth Avenue comes to an end at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.  At that spot there is a large triumphal arch designed by the architect Stanford White and built in 1892.  Each year they put a Christmas tree under that arch.  If you view the tree from the south (as here) you can see the Empire State Building in the distance, about a mile and a half away.  It is lit up in red and green colors for the Christmas holiday.

Over in the West Village at Abingdon Square Park, we have a more modest Christmas tree in our little corner of greenery.  In this view, looking south, you can see the new One World Trade Center to the right of the tree. 

Merry Christmas to all!

How To Tell Who's Lying To You: Climate Science Edition

Scott Adams -- known, among other things, as the cartoonist behind the Dilbert series -- has an excellent blog on which he posts something thoughtful nearly every day.  His particular interest is in the arts of persuasion.  Recently he has dipped his toe into the subject of "climate science," with a focus on the apparent inability of partisans on either side of the debate ever to convince a single person to come over from the other side.  Now, suppose you come to this debate with no scientific expertise and no ax to grind for either side.  The debate has very significant public policy implications, and understanding it is important to being an informed voter.  How are you to supposed to evaluate the arguments and come to a view?  Adams comments:

My bottom-line belief about climate science is that non-scientists such as myself have no reliable way to evaluate any of this stuff. Our brains and experience are not up to the task. When I apply my tiny brain to sniffing out the truth about climate science I see rock-solid arguments on both sides of the debate.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with Adams on this one.  If you are a reasonably intelligent person, and you are willing to spend a few hours on an issue, there is a very workable method to discern which side of a debate is not playing straight with you.  This method is the same method generally used by judges and juries in deciding which side is going to win a trial.  The method is this:  look to which side has and provides the best answers to the hard questions posed by the other side.  If one side refuses to answer hard questions, or is evasive, or refuses to provide the underlying methodology by which it came up with its answers, then that side has a problem.  And rightfully so. 

I'll give just a few examples of this phenomenon relevant to the climate change issue.

(1) The Hockey Stick graph.  The so-called Hockey Stick graph first appeared in a paper by Mann, Bradley and Hughes that was published in Nature magazine in 1998.  It purported to show a reconstruction of worldwide temperatures from the year 1000 to present, in which the temperatures had remained almost completely stable for the first 900 years (the "shaft" of the Hockey Stick), and then suddenly shot up in the twentieth century in the time of human CO2 emissions (the "blade").  This reconstruction effectively repealed the prior accepted version of climate history, in which temperatures had been warmer than the present at least in the so-called Medieval Warm Period of about 1000 - 1300, and probably also in the Roman Warm Period around the year 0.  When the UN's climate-evaluation body, the IPCC, issued its next Assessment Report in 2001, the Hockey Stick graph had suddenly become the icon of the whole endeavor, appearing multiple times in the Report.  The Hockey Stick seemed like the perfect proof of the proposition that global warming must be caused by humans, because anyone could see from the graph that the warming had all occurred in the era of human use of fossil fuels.  Here is a version of the Hockey Stick graph from the IPCC Third Assessment Report:

Unfortunately for Mann et al. and the IPCC, numerous people -- those nefarious "skeptics" --promptly began to ask questions about the source of the information behind the "shaft" of the stick.  Thus these skeptics were questioning the ideas that temperatures had remained essentially stable for a millennium and that there had been no Medieval Warm Period.  The most famous of the skeptical researchers was a Canadian named Stephen McIntyre.  McIntyre began a blog called Climate Audit, and started writing many long posts about his efforts, all unsuccessful, to replicate the Mann et al. work.  Requests to Mann et al. for their data and methodologies were met with hostility and evasion.  Over time, McIntyre gradually established that Mann et al. had adopted a complex methodology that selectively emphasized certain temperature proxies over others in order to reverse-engineer the "shaft" of the stick to get a pre-determined desired outcome.

The coup de grace for the Hockey Stick graph came with the so-called Climategate emails, released in 2009.  These were emails between and among many of the main promoters of the climate scare (dubbed by McIntyre the "Hockey Team").  Included in the Climategate releases were emails relating specifically to the methodology of how the graph was created.  From the emails, skeptical researchers were then able to identify some of the precise data series that had been used by Mann et al.  Astoundingly, they discovered that the graph's creators had truncated inconvenient data in order to get the desired depiction.  A website called Just the Facts has a detailed recounting of how this was uncovered.  As a key example, consider this graph:

The bright pink represents data that was deleted from the Mann et al. reconstruction because, obviously,  it would have thrown off the nice, flat "shaft" of the stick, while also revealing that this particular "proxy" had totally failed at predicting the twentieth century rise in temperatures.  Most would call this kind of data truncation "scientific fraud."

Note that the revelations that came out of the Hockey Stick controversy do not prove that the human-caused global warming hypothesis is wrong.  However, those revelations did show beyond doubt that the leading promoters of the hypothesis had resorted to fraud in the effort to get the public to accept their position.  Once that was established, why would you believe anything else they say?

Even today, the Wikipedia write-up of the Hockey Stick controversy takes a position favorable to Mann et al.  If you are willing to devote some time to this issue, read that article next to the write-up at Just the Facts linked above.  I would call the Wikipedia article evasive in the face of highly credible allegations of fraud.  See if you agree.

(2) Adjustments to the instrumental temperature record.  World temperature records based on ground-based thermometers date back to about the late 19th century in most cases.  These records are far more accurate than what we have from earlier times (which are mostly "proxies," like tree rings and ice cores); but the ground thermometer records still have plenty of problems.  As examples, the location of a ground station could have been moved over time, sometimes multiple times in over 100 years; the physical surroundings of a station could have changed (trees could have grown up, or an adjacent parking lot could have been built); the type of instrument could have changed; and so forth.  Most would agree that some sorts of adjustments to the record, known as "homogenization," are appropriate to make the earlier data comparable to the more recent data.  However, here the adjustments are in the hands of small numbers of people who are committed to the global warming cause.  Most of the adjusters are government employees working for weather agencies like NASA and NOAA in the U.S., and comparable agencies in other countries.  

As with the Hockey Stick graph, independent researchers interested in the topic have gone to work at their own expense to try to understand the government's adjustments and evaluate if they are appropriate.  Notable among these researchers are Tony Heller at the website Real Climate Science and Paul Homewood at Not a Lot of People Know That.  What these researchers find is that, in literally every case, earlier temperatures have been adjusted downward, and to a lesser extent, later temperatures adjusted upward.  Obviously, such adjustments can create warming trends where they do not exist in the raw data, and enhance what otherwise might be small warming trends to make them look significant and even scary.  Here at Manhattan Contrarian, I have covered this issue in a now ten part series called The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time.  All ten articles are collected, along with others, here.

And literally every time anyone looks at raw temperature data, and compares it to current "final" version temperature data, the same phenomenon is found.  Just this week at Watts Up With That, an Australian meteorologist named Brendan Godwin reports that Australia is subject to the same pervasive corruption as other places:

The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network–Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) Technical Advisory Forum released a report in 2015 confirming that the Surface Air Temperatures were being adjusted, confirming the process is called Homogenization, confirming that other weather monitoring institutions around the world are making these same adjustments and purporting to justify why the adjustments are being made. Observing practices change, thermometers change, stations move from one location to another and new weather stations are installed. They refused to release their complex mathematical formula used to make the adjustments.

Go to the link to see how a slightly declining temperature trend at Rotherglen, Australia, has been turned into a more-than-one-degree-C-per-century increasing trend through supposed "homogenization" adjustments.  Huh?

But the most important part of this story is not the suspicious nature of the adjustments themselves, but rather the flat refusal of the adjusters to reveal the methodology by which the adjustments have been made.  Real, honest scientists would gladly provide the full, unedited computer code that made the adjustments, and would answer any questions that would help an independent researcher to replicate the results.  Yet read through posts of people reporting on the adjustments, and you will universally find that they have been rebuffed in their attempts to find out what is going on.  For example, as I reported in this post in July 2015, a heating consultant in Maine named Michael Brakey, who was just trying to get accurate temperature data to inform his business, stumbled on major recent downward adjustments of earlier temperatures in that state.  Attempting to get the details of the adjustments, the best that NOAA would give him was this vague and preposterous statement:

“…improvements in the dataset, and brings our value much more in line with what was observed at the time. The new method used stations in neighboring Canada to inform estimates for data-sparse areas within Maine (a great improvement).”  

All you need to do is read my series of posts on this topic, and/or some of the many links found in those posts, and you will know that what is going on is not remotely honest.  You don't need any specialized scientific training to figure this out.

(3) Hottest [week/month/year] ever.  Readers of my series on The Greatest Scientific Fraud of All Time are aware that our government bureaucrats at NASA and NOAA regularly put out breathless press releases announcing that some given month, or series of months, or year, was the hottest such period on record.  For example, in this post from August 2015, I reported on government press releases as to March, May and July 2015, declaring them each to be the "hottest ever" on some or another criterion.  That post also reports on how the press releases are then picked up and repeated, more or less word for word, by every news source going under the banner of "mainstream": CNN, Bloomberg, Washington Post, USA Today, BBC, AP, LA Times, CBS News, and many, many more.

But does any one of these press releases, or any one of these news sources, so much as mention that these so-called "records" are based on temperature records that have been "adjusted" to enhance warming trends?  Given how widespread is the information on unexplained warming-enhancing "adjustments," it is almost incomprehensible that not one of these news sources would even ask the question, "How much of the warming is in the raw data and how much is in the adjustments?"  But if such a thing exists, I can't find it.

I could give many more examples, but undoubtedly you are getting the picture.  A reasonably intelligent person who investigates the situation will quickly find that the promoters of the global warming scare refuse to reveal their detailed methodology, refuse to allow independent researchers to try to replicate their work, and refuse to answer any and all hard questions.  (By contrast, when, for example, skeptical scientists a few months ago released a major Research Report claiming to invalidate all the bases for the EPA's Endangerment Finding, all data and methods were released simultaneously.)  This is all you need to know to make up your mind. 

UPDATE, December 29:  Tony Heller at realclimatescience.com has a great post on December 28 demonstrating that, at least within the United States, all warming reported by our government to have occurred since the late 1800s is a result of the adjustments to data and does not exist in the raw data.  Here is Heller's key chart:

The total of the adjustments is about 1.5 deg F, just about exactly equal to the amount of the reported "warming."  Why aren't we entitled to detailed, complete code and justification for each and every "adjustment"?

Is There Any News In The New York Times That Is Not Fake?

I'm old enough to remember when the New York Times used to have long articles filled with facts and figures, data and statistics on one issue or another.  Well, that was then -- before they had to lay off half the staff.  Now they produce articles just as long, but the formula has changed.  Instead of doing difficult leg work and collecting the real facts and figures, the new formula is to utter some obviously false statement as if it were a fact, and then fill in the rest of some multi-thousand-word article with standard-issue progressive talking points all dependent on acceptance of the false fact as the starting point. 

Friday's example of the phenomenon was an endless "climate change" article which blamed the West African refugee exodus on global warming, backed up with ridiculous and obviously false statements about the African Sahel region, like "droughts [have become] more frequent and more fierce," and it has become "impossible to grow enough food" -- when everybody who follows the actual data knows that the Sahel region has become both wetter and more agriculturally productive in recent years.  

Today's Times contains multiple more examples of the same phenomenon.

Yes, there is another one of these endless "climate change" articles, again occupying the lion's share of page A1 plus a page and a half (A14 and A15) in the interior.  This time, they're trying to convince us that polar bears are "climate refugees" because they turn up at remote Alaskan towns to look for food at the local garbage dump.  What is the evidence that polar bears are "climate refugees"?  Please, don't expect any facts and figures on what is happening with temperatures or ice coverage in the Arctic; that would tax the poor reader's intelligence way too much.  Instead, we'll just make one of those broad statements of "fact" without citing any actual source or data:

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and the ice cover is retreating at a pace that even the climate scientists who predicted the decline find startling.

Can we actually confirm those statements from any independent source?  Over at Not A Lot of People Know That, Paul Homewood is ready with an actual collection of facts and figures to counter the "hottest Arctic ever" hype that seems to be coming out all over the place.  Here, for example, is a chart of Arctic temperature anomalies from 1979 to present per UAH:  

Looking at that chart, you might be forgiven for observing that Arctic temperatures had been dropping rather steadily since 2010, and then there was a spike just this past year associated with the 2015-16 El Nino.  (And if you follow the subject, you will know that the 2009-10 spike was also associated with a major El Nino, while the 2015-16 El Nino-related spike has been rapidly dissipating all over the world in recent months.)  So how exactly do we know that the 2015-16 spike has anything to do with human carbon emissions, or that it is anything more than a one-year El Nino-related anomaly?  Somehow, in around 4000 words, the Times does not have enough space to address that question. 

And how about the Times's statement that Arctic ice cover "has been retreating at a [startling] pace"?  Here is a chart of Arctic ice cover for the past several years from the Danish Meteorological Institute:

Sure looks like 2016 ice cover is right in the same range now (December) as in 2012 - 2015 -- and the September minimum was a lot lower in 2012.  But why should we let a few facts get in the way of a good narrative?

At Watts Up With That, Eric Worrall points out that the locals in the northern Alaska villages are dependent on tourists who come to see the polar bears.  Could there be an alternative explanation to the "climate refugee" narrative for the prevalence of the bears in the villages?:

Regarding the large numbers of bears around Kaktovik, does anyone think it possible locals whose income depends on “hundreds of tourists” visiting to see the bears might be deliberately leaving some food out?

Meanwhile, over at the editorial page, the lead editorial is given over to attacking HUD Secretary-designate Ben Carson for his allegedly "warped view of housing."  What is wrong with Carson's view?  He is skeptical of the idea that subsidized HUD housing actually helps the beneficiaries, as opposed to trapping them in poverty and dependency for life.  And in particular, Carson has expressed skepticism that HUD's latest "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing" scheme -- placing subsidized housing in wealthier communities and suburbs -- will accomplish anything meaningful for the intended beneficiaries.  After all, says Pravda:

Research shows that integrating poorer families into healthier, mixed-income neighborhoods has improved prospects for them and their children.

That's right, "research shows" that integrating poor families into wealthier neighborhoods improves their prospects.  Here's the "research" I recommend to the reporters and editors at Pravda.  Get outside of your damn offices, open your eyes, and walk around your home island of Manhattan.  It is the wealthiest large county in the country, and not by a little.  And it is home to proportionally more HUD-subsidized housing than anywhere, housing around 8% of the population of the island.  Many of those HUD-subsidized "projects" are in or immediately adjacent to some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, including Park Avenue on the Upper East Side, the Lincoln Center area on the Upper West Side, Chelsea on the Lower West Side, and close to three miles of the waterfront along the Lower East Side.  These projects are right in the midst of the largest agglomeration of high-paying jobs in the world.  And with all that, the residents have not been helped one tiny little bit to escape from poverty, or to improve their prospects.  The "poverty rate" in these projects is said to exceed 50%, and the turnover rate is a ridiculously low 3%, meaning that essentially everyone who ever gets in gets trapped in poverty and stays for life.  Seventy years or so into a massive investment in subsidized housing as a supposed "anti-poverty" initiative, most of the formerly-poor people in Manhattan have exited poverty -- except the residents of the HUD-subsidized housing.  If HUD-subsidized housing is such a total and abject failure at getting anyone out of poverty in super-wealthy Manhattan, what exactly is the explanation for how it is ever going to work somewhere else?

At Pravda, everything they say is fake.  I guess we just have to get used to it.   

The New York Times Goes Full "Fake News"

It seems just days ago that the New York Times was all worked up over the threat of "fake news," and particularly how some fake stories may have helped swing the recent election to Trump.  For example, just before the election on November 6, the big headline was "Media's Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News."  On November 20 there was a deep analysis of the nefarious processes by which "fake news" gets wide dissemination, "How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study."  And on the same day, an anguished call for the proprietors of Facebook to crack down on the use of their platform for spreading fake information:  "Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Must Defend the Truth."    Looking at these and many other such stories, you might even get the idea that Pravda might care a little about having the news be real, as opposed to maybe only caring about getting its preferred candidate elected.

Before you get too far believing something so ridiculous, you will really need to check out today's effort.  In a paper that is six columns in width, five of them across the top of the front page are occupied by a picture of some migrants in a pick-up truck heading out across the Sahel in Niger toward Libya and, they hope, on to Europe.  Immediately underneath, a three-column-wide story is covered by the big headline of the day, "Escaping Drought and War on a 'Road on Fire.'"  The story continues on to the entirety of pages A10 and A11 in the interior of the paper.  This is the story of seemingly an entire generation of young men in West Africa picking up and heading north in search of a better life.

Oh, the sub-headline of the article is "Carbon's Casualties."  The article is part of the Times's series of gigantic articles on what are supposedly the terrible effects of "climate change." 

[P]eel back the layers of their stories and you find a complex bundle of trouble and want that prompts the men and boys of West Africa to leave home, endure beatings and bribes, board a smuggler’s pickup truck and try to make a living far, far away.  They do it because the rains have become so fickle, the days measurably hotter, the droughts more frequent and more fierce, making it impossible to grow enough food on their land. . . .  This journey has become a rite of passage for West Africans of his generation. The slow burn of climate change makes subsistence farming, already risky business in a hot, arid region, even more of a gamble.

So -- what is the source of this information that "droughts [have become] more frequent and more fierce," making it "impossible to grow enough food" in the Sahel region?  You won't find it in this article.  Try to confirm that information elsewhere, and you will find exactly the opposite:

From Reuters, June 1, 2015, citing a study in Nature Climate Change (no climate change skeptics!):

Rising greenhouse gases have boosted rainfall in the Sahel region of Africa, easing droughts that killed 100,000 people in the 1970s and 1980s, in a rare positive effect of climate change, a study said on Monday. . . .  "Amounts of rainfall have recovered substantially," said Rowan Sutton, a professor at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at Britain's Reading University and co-author of the study in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Or this from a report by Philipp Mueller for the Global Warming Policy Foundation:

The Sahara is actually shrinking, with vegetation arising on land where there was nothing but sand and rocks before.  The southern border of the Sahara has been retreating since the early 1980s, making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa. There has been a spectacular regeneration of vegetation in northern Burkina Faso, which was devastated by drought and advancing deserts 20 years ago. . . .  The main reason for the greening of the Sahara and the Sahel has been an increase in rainfall since the mid-1980s.  Of the 40 rainfall stations across the Sahel, most of them have been observing an increase in rainfall.

And how about that bit about the days being "measurably hotter"?  Get far enough into the endless Times article, and you find this:

Meanwhile, in what is already one of the hottest places on Earth, it has gotten steadily hotter: by 0.7 degrees Celsius since 1975, Fews Net has found.

0.7 of a degree?  That's not even enough that you could tell if it happened without a thermometer. 

Really, is it possible to get any more fake than this?

A Modest Proposal

(It occurs to me that some readers -- particularly younger ones who have studied English-language writers only since the banishment of Dead White Males from the university curriculum -- may be unfamiliar with the reference in the title to the classic 1729 essay by Jonathan Swift.  If you haven't read it, here is a link.  As you will see, my proposal is considerably more modest.)

I will not be the first to point out the clear signal sent by President-elect Trump with many of his cabinet appointments of an intent to reverse major policies of the Obama administration in many areas.  To consider just a few examples:

•  Department of Education.  Its mission under Obama (and to be fair, under prior Presidents as well) has been to use the piles of free federal money to prop up overpriced and ineffective unionized government schools so that the unions can maximize their revenue, and any and all reforms can be avoided.  Trump nominee Betsy DeVos is a leader in advocating for charter schools and school choice, and is a bete noire of the teachers' unions.
• Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Its mission under Obama (and again, also under prior Presidents) has been to provide subsidized apartments to people deemed to be poor, and thereby keep those people trapped in poverty and dependency for their entire lives.  Trump nominee Ben Carson has been a leading advocate for reducing dependency on the government among poor people, and particularly among blacks.
• Department of Energy and EPA.  Their mission under Obama has been supporting and funding global warming alarmism, subsidizing uneconomic intermittent energy sources, and trying to put energy from fossil fuels out of business.  Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry actually advocated eliminating the Department of Energy during his own presidential campaign.  EPA Administrator-designate Scott Pruitt has spent years initiating lawsuits against EPA seeking to strike down some of its major regulations.

So, when the new guys at the top come in, can they just turn these agencies around and start with new policies?  If you read the Constitution, the answer would seem to be, of course they can!  (Article II, Section 1: "The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.")  But realists will recognize that there are only a handful of political appointees at the top of each department or agency, while the thousands of "permanent" or "career" employees are protected against firing by civil service laws.  And somehow these people think that, while the political appointees come and go, the career employees are the ones who really run the place.

How bad will be the resistance to change?  We got a preliminary indication a couple of days ago after the Trump "landing team" for the Energy Department sent a 74-part informational questionnaire to the department.  One of the areas of inquiry was a request for the names of department staffers who had worked on "climate change" programs.  Does that request seem reasonable to you?  It did not seem reasonable to the current DOE or its staffers.  They have "rejected" these requests for information.  From The Hill on December 13:

The Department of Energy said Tuesday it will reject the request by President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team to name staffers who worked on climate change programs.  Energy spokesman Eben Burnhan-Snyder said the agency received “significant feedback” from workers regarding a questionnaire from the transition team that leaked last week.  “Some of the questions asked left many in our workforce unsettled,” Snyder said.

Well, I guess that's how it works in the Federal Government:  If the requests of your new boss make you "unsettled," you just "reject" them.  And if that's how they react to a simple request for information as to who is doing what, imagine how they are going to react when they actually get an assignment to do something that runs counter to what they think should be done! 

The article in The Hill goes on to quote from the employees' union boss, articulating the view that there is nothing political about this, and the staffers are just neutral, a-political experts trying to go about their jobs:

“My members are upset and have questions about what this means. These are all civil servants who do their jobs,” Tony Reardon, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said in a statement.  “They have no wish to be caught up in political winds — they are nonpartisan employees — scientists, engineers, statisticians, economists and financial experts — who were hired for their knowledge and they bring their talent and experience to the job every day,” he said, adding that the union “will do all it can to ensure that merit system rules are followed.”

Actually, no.  There is absolutely nothing "nonpartisan" about this.  The Department of Energy is substantially if not entirely engaged in carrying out policies that are favored by Democrats and opposed by Republicans -- policies like promoting and subsidizing wind and solar energy and hamstringing and restricting fossil fuels.  Do you think that even the Energy Information Agency is nonpartisan?  Don't be ridiculous.  Their "levelized cost of energy" reports are carefully engineered to defraud the American people into supporting "renewable" energy by downplaying the real costs of wind and solar energy by a factor of five or ten or more.  The same overt or covert partisanship is equally if not more true at Education, HUD, EPA, and, for that matter, throughout the government.  

How bad is the partisanship in the government?  Surely, you say, there must be at least a few Republicans in the government who can be counted on to keep things fair!  If you think that, you are deluding yourself.  Analyze the election results from the District of Columbia, and you come away realizing that virtually every single person who works for the federal government is a Democrat.

Here are the presidential results from the District of Columbia.  Hillary Clinton got 90.9% of the votes, a percentage far higher than her percent in any of the fifty states.  (Her highest percentage in any of the states was in Hawaii at 62.3%.)  Donald Trump and Gary Johnson between them won just 5.7% of the votes in D.C., about 17,600 votes in total.  But think about this:  Washington has a substantial Republican establishment.  The RNC is headquartered in DC.  The Republicans held substantial majorities in both the House and Senate before the recent election, and the Republican members of Congress plus their committees had something in the range of 4000 staffers based in the District.  And those people have families.  And there is a substantial group of Republican, conservative and libertarian think tanks and policy organizations based in D.C. -- as examples, consider the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Federalist Society, and so forth.  And their staffers also have families.  Add up all the professional and paid Republican and conservative-side people in Washington and their families, and you have accounted for literally every Republican vote in the District.  The number of Republicans actually working in the government has to be so small that you will need a microscope to find them.

And yes, it is absolutely reasonable to expect that every single one of the government employees regards Trump and his people as illegitimate interlopers, and those employees will do everything in their power to hinder and obstruct any agenda of reform.

So, what to do about it?  The obvious first answer is, fire these people and hire new ones who will do your bidding.  Unfortunately, that is likely to be a poor answer.  The so-called "civil service" protections for career federal employees go back to the 1880s.  Do they violate the constitutional provision that vests all executive authority in the President?  I would say they do, but you could litigate that issue for the entire next four years without getting any definitive result and without getting rid of a single person.  You might even lose outright.

So here's the modest proposal: If the government cannot fire these people, then it can assign them to other tasks in other places.  By fortuitous coincidence, the recent several years have seen downsizing in two sectors known for having very large buildings, many of them located in remote and out-of-the-way areas.  Those two sectors are manufacturing and retail.  Places like rural Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Arkansas, and upstate New York -- not to mention northern Maine, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and even Alaska -- are littered with abandoned K-Marts, JC Penney's and Sears stores, as well as abandoned factories of all sorts.  These buildings can be leased for a song.  Hundreds of federal employees can be assigned to each such location.

Send each such employee a memo:  "Starting Monday morning at 9 AM, your job will be located at the former Sears Hometown store, 2308 11th Avenue West, Williston, North Dakota.  If you report for work, you will await such assignments as may be given to you at that location.  If you do not show up, your pay will be continued until your unused vacation and sick leave are exhausted, and then your pay will stop."

Inside the former Sears or K-Mart, there can be row upon row of hundreds of desks and chairs.  But I highly recommend that these employees not be provided with any computer or cell phone at taxpayer expense.  Why waste the money?  They can communicate with headquarters in Washington by U.S. mail.  It's not like they are doing anything productive.

Something tells me that the incoming Trump team will stop short of adopting my proposal.  But they should adopt it.  For the next four years, essentially every federal employee in Washington is going to be conducting an unrelenting guerilla campaign to undermine everything the administration wants to do.  If the administration only pushes back a little, it will be steamrolled by the permanent government Blob.  Time to act decisively!  If anyone can do that, it is Trump.

UPDATE, December 16:  The normally sensible Megan McArdle at Bloomberg View comments on the Trump transition team questionnaire to the Department of Energy (asking for names of DOE employees working on "climate change" matters) as follows:

[The Department of Energy] should not comply with this request unless some law requires it. This request reeks of witch-hunting people because they might have views on climate change that our president-elect, or someone on his staff, dislike. That is no way to run an organization, or a nation.

What?  The incoming administration has an absolute right to find out who is working on what, and to re-direct people from working on Project A to Project B.  Career employees have no "right" to continue to spend taxpayer resources on projects that the newly elected representatives of the people do not want done.  How is this a "witch hunt"?  If the new people do not find out who is working on Project A, and stop that work, and direct the effort over to Project B, then they are not doing their job.