NYMag: “This week, congressional Republicans gave themselves the power to slash the annual salary of any individual federal worker to as low as $1 — and the budget of any individual federal program right down to zero. They executed this attack on the independence of the civil service by reviving an obscure provision enacted by Congress in 1876: The Holman Rule, named after the Indiana congressman who devised it, empowers any member of Congress to submit an amendment to an appropriations bill that targets the funding of a specific government program or employee. The rule was devised before the advent of a nonpolitical, career civil service and was rarely invoked in the modern era. In 1983, Democratic speaker Tip O’Neill laid it to rest. For the past three decades, Congress has had the power to slash any agency’s overall budget, but not to target specific projects or civil servants for funding cuts or downsizing. Until now.

“This is a big rule change inside there that allows people to get at places they hadn’t before,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters this week. “All agencies should be held accountable and tested in a manner and this is an avenue to allow them to do it.”

…Virginia congressman H. Morgan Griffith led the charge for reviving the Holman Rule, after learning about how much the federal government spends on the upkeep of wild horses ($80 million, apparently). When the Washington Post asked Griffith if the new rule would be used to cut “huge swaths” of the federal workforce, he replied, “I can’t tell you it won’t happen … The power is there. But isn’t that appropriate? Who runs this country, the people of the United States or the people on the people’s payroll?” Here, Griffith elides the fact that those on “the people’s payroll” do not pursue programs born of their own individual whims, but rather, work to execute and enforce laws passed by the people’s duly elected representatives. (The House GOP may not approve of the Clean Air Act, but the Environmental Protection Agency does not undermine democracy when it works to enforce existing law.)…”