“Process is hard to love. It slows things down.”

Process is hard to love. It slows things down. It is frustrating to people who want action. No one votes for process. All presidents have chafed at and sidestepped it to some degree. But all presidents have been forced to rely on it too. This is because the executive branch is, in reality, a network of giant bureaucracies, not just a person who wants to express herself.

…a number of [Trump] critics had counted on executive branch processes to temper Trump’s worst impulses and ugliest campaign promises. Process would discipline Trump, they had said. He simple couldn’t do the many things he had promised as a candidate; the vast bureaucracies of the executive branch would delay policies, imposing facts and levels of review and injecting carve-outs and exemptions. These commentators didn’t imagine that Trump would simply sidestep the process entirely.

–From Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War On The World’s Most Powerful Office, by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes

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