The debate began with the First Congress, but largely petered out in the early 1800s and didn't really pick up again until the rise of the regulatory state in the early 1900s.

There are newer law review articles but none quite so comprehensive and earnest as Cass R. Sunstein & Lawrence Lessig, "The President and the Administration," 94 Columbia Law Review 1 (1994), https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles/7779/

That's the same Lawrence Lessig who fought (and lost) copyright extension. 1994 is long before tribal politics became as pervasive and extreme in academia as it is today (not that it didn't exist back then). The paper pulls its punches and assumes unitary executive proponents are arguing in good faith, rather than rationalizing a foregone conclusion.

Thank you for the link. I will certainly give it a read but I'm sure the HN thread will be long dead by the time I read and absorb it.

My main beef with the tenor of this whole thread in general is people do not seem aware of the historical rises and falls in executive power. For example, perhaps they did not call it a "unitary executive" then, but the executive power surely reached its zenith under FDR, with all sorts of behaviors and actions we would regard now with boggled eyes and before which even Trump's more radical actions tend to pale. [Perhaps most applicable to this thread, FDR openly wielded the power of the 'independent' FCC to silence his opposition, to the point where NBC and CBS felt compelled to announce they "would not air any broadcast that was in any way critical of any policy of the Administration.".] Everything worked out OK.

Ironically, of course, that's also the guy who was probably most responsible for the explosion of the size of the administrative state - he really, in a meaningful sense, refounded American government. And while there was good and obvious reasons for the immense expansion of the administrative state, and I'm open to legal reasons either way, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that there's really good social reasons to not have "independent" agencies - I suspect more direct democratic input (the President does X) nets out better in terms of social trust and cohesiveness even when it makes often much dumber decisions.