ABSTRACT
Even before the end of the 19th century, there were premonitory signs of that weakening, delegation and erosion of Congress' law-making power that have gone on so rapidly and dramatically since 1933. It is the permanent bureaucracy as a whole that can be taken as constituting "the fourth branch". No one any longer questions the fact, but only the degree and the merits of this century's aggrandizement of the executive branch within the aggrandized central government. The combined bureaucracy has become, rather, a fourth primary branch of the central government. The bureaucracy, like the Carolingian Mayors of the Palace in 8th-century France, not merely wields its own share of the sovereign power but begins to challenge the older branches for supremacy. Congressmen believe that the great growth of administrative law-making has become a menace to the constitutional function of Congress as the legislative branch of the national government.
