Inside Trump’s Second-Term Mission to Dismantle the Administrative State

For many years, and in many places, I have been railing against the rise of what people like me have called “the administrative state,” “the deep state,” “the Syndicate.” In an essay called “The Imperative of Freedom” for the June 2017 issue of The New Criterion, I drew upon the work of the political philosopher James Burnham to point out that at least since the 1940s, real legislative power had been increasingly concentrated in what Burnham called “administrative bureaus,” not parliaments or Congress.

“‘Laws’ today in the United States,” Burnham wrote in The Managerial Revolution (1941), “are not being made any longer by Congress, but by the NLRB, SEC, ICC, AAA, TVA, FTC, FCC, the Office of Production Management (what a revealing title!), and the other leading ‘executive agencies.’”

And note that Burnham wrote decades before the advent of the EPA, HUD, CFPB, FSOC, the Department of Education, and the rest of the administrative alphabet soup that governs us in the United States today. As the economist Charles Calomiris pointed out in his short but important book Reforming Financial Regulation After Dodd-Frank (2017), we are increasingly governed not by laws but by ad hoc dictats emanating from semi-autonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force of law.

Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress, just as Article III vests all judicial authority in the Court. The administrative state is a mechanism for circumventing both. In The Administrative Threat, the legal scholar Philip Hamburger describes this shadowy Leviathan as “a state within a state,” a sort of parallel legal and political structure populated by unelected bureaucrats. Binding citizens not through Congressionally enacted statutes but through the edicts of the managerial bureaucracy, the administrative state, said Hamburger, is “all about the evasion of governance through law, including an evasion of constitutional processes and procedural rights.” Accordingly, he concludes, the encroaching activity of the administrative state represents “the nation’s preeminent threat to civil liberties.”

Around the time that Donald Trump took office the first time in January 2017, his chief strategist Steve Bannon said that one of his primary goals was to “deconstruct the administrative state.” In the event, Trump’s first term managed only to nibble around the edges of the administrative state. Why? For one thing, Trump, the political outsider, was unprepared for the adamantine wall of resistance he would face from the entrenched Washington bureaucracy. It was, by the way, the same bureaucracy that harassed, investigated, impeached, indicted, and attempted to imprison him. It also worked overtime to upset any serious reforms he attempted.

During his first term, Trump made a yeoman’s effort to unwind the regulatory behemoth that our government had become. He did roll back some bits of the regulatory burden that had increasingly stymied the institutions of civil society. He even made some important moves to extract certain pieces of the governing apparatus from the smothering, nearly 100-percent-left-progressive Geist of Washington. For example, David Bernhardt, Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, actually managed to move important parts of his agency out of Washington to, well, to the interior, where it belongs. He recounts his efforts in You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State (2023). Predictably, though. Bernhardt’s good work was instantly undone by executive order when Joe Biden came to power in 2021.

The same can be said about much that Donald Trump accomplished in his efforts to tackle the administrative state in his first term.

I am confident that things will be very different in Trump’s second term. For a brief but rousing explanation of why I think things will be different, and better this time, I recommend the brief but scintillating essay in The Wall Street Journal by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy called The DOGE Plan to Reform Government.

As all the world knows, Musk and Ramaswamy have been tapped by President Trump to lead a new, blessedly temporary initiative called “The Department of Government Efficiency.” Their announced end date is July 4, 2026, by which time they hope to make some important inroads against the federal debt (currently an eye-watering and unsustainable $35 trillion dollars), cut billions in governmental expenditures, and fire many tens of thousands of timeservers on the government, which means the taxpayer, payroll.

Musk and Ramaswamy begin as I did, by noting that “most legal edicts” in America today are not

laws enacted by Congress but “rules and regulations” promulgated by unelected bureaucrats—tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants within government agencies who view themselves as immune from firing thanks to civil-service protections.

This self-engorging, self-perpetuating monster represents “an existential threat to our republic,” Musk and Ramaswamy argue. They are right. And it is refreshing to see that they come not with white papers and committee recommendations but with real, implementable, enforceable proposals for reform. “We are entrepreneurs, not politicians,” they explain. “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.”

How? First, by identifying and hiring “a lean team of small-government crusaders, including some of the sharpest technical and legal minds in America. This team will work in the new administration closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings. We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”

In the background, helping to enable this work, are two important Supreme Court decisions. The first is West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), which says that agencies may not impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress specifically authorizes them to do so. The second is Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), which overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine under which federal courts were to “defer” to the interpretation of the law promulgated by the regulatory agencies.

Won’t a future president be able to nullify what reforms DOGE actualizes by countermanding executive orders? No, because Congress will once again be put in the driver’s seat, as the Founders intended. “The use of executive orders to substitute for lawmaking by adding burdensome new rules is a constitutional affront,” Musk and Ramaswamy note, “but the use of executive orders to roll back regulations that wrongly bypassed Congress is legitimate and necessary to comply with the Supreme Court’s recent mandates. And after those regulations are fully rescinded, a future president couldn’t simply flip the switch and revive them but would instead have to ask Congress to do so.” (My emphasis.)

This dismantling of the regulatory octopus will enable the real goals of DOGE, beginning with “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” i.e., mass firings. “The number of federal employees to cut should be at least proportionate to the number of federal regulations that are nullified: Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited.” Won’t that simply swell the ranks of the unemployed? Not if it is done right. “Employees whose positions are eliminated,” Musk and Ramaswamy write, “deserve to be treated with respect, and DOGE’s goal is to help support their transition into the private sector.”

Musk and Ramaswamy go into some detail about how they would accomplish this huge but delicate surgery. The end or telos of their labors is “delivering cost savings for taxpayers.” The list of agencies, private as well as public, that are currently supping at the government’s trough is long and expensive. Musk and Ramaswamy list just a few candidates for removal from the federal gravy train. There are currently more than $500 billion in annual federal expenditures that are not authorized by Congress, “from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.” Cut them all.

Musk and Ramaswamy end by taking aim at the government’s broken procurement process. The Pentagon, which just failed its seventh annual audit, presides over a budget of some $800 billion but cannot account for how it spends the money.

Donald Trump’s decisive victory on November 5 gives him a rare mandate for change. The initiatives outlined by Musk and Ramaswamy are an important part of the MAGA agenda. They are right that Trump’s victory presents them with a “historic opportunity for structural reductions in the federal government.” Yes, there will be a furious “onslaught from entrenched interests in Washington.” The regime does not like change, especially when it threatens their perquisites. Expect the bureaucrats to fight tooth and claw to oppose DOGE. Musk and Ramaswamy say they understand what they are up against. They say further that they are prepared for the battle and “expect to prevail.” It won’t be easy. But as Spinoza observed, Sed omnia præclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt: “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”