Last week in this virtual space, I wrote that Donald Trump would make a renewed effort during his second term to dismantle “the administrative state.” As in his first term, he would employ various strategies to blunt the effects of the administrative apparatus that governs us. He would, for example, disperse some parts of the government outside the overwhelmingly left-progressive swamp of Washington, D.C.
As an aside, I should note that I regard the persistence of Washington as the seat of our government as a serious impediment to the goal of “deconstructing” the administrative state. “It has,” I wrote back in 2022, “long been obvious to candid observers that there is something deeply dysfunctional about that overwhelmingly Democratic, welfare-addicted city.”
It is a partisan sinkhole. Jefferson wanted the capital moved from New York to Washington in part to bring it closer to the South, but also to place it in a locality that was officially neutral. There is nothing neutral about Washington today. The city has some impressive architecture and urban vistas. They should be preserved and staffed as tourist attractions. But the reins of power should be relocated.
I doubt that will happen. Which means that the eternal vigilance that MAGA must maintain around its enemies will have to be redoubled. Trump attempting to govern from Washington will be like Ike trying to undertake the Normandy invasion with half his planners on loan from the German general staff.
Still, there are some symbolic gestures that he and his aides might consider. I have long suggested that the inauguration be held somewhere other than Washington, D.C. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires the inauguration be in Washington. LBJ, remember, was sworn in on Air Force One just a couple of hours after Kennedy was assassinated. When Warren Harding died, Calvin Coolidge was visiting the family homestead in Vermont. His father, a justice of the peace, administered the oath of office in the parlor. I think the next inauguration should be well away from the swamp of Washington. Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach is one venue that springs to mind, but I am sure there are other attractive spots. At a minimum, I hope the inauguration committee will consider having some of the parties elsewhere. A ball in Butler, PA, for example, would not only be celebratory but also serve as a useful reminder of how close Trump came to a fatal encounter with an assassin’s bullet.
But the trouble with “Washington”—I use scare quotes to indicate that we are dealing with spiritual as well as geographical dispensation—is not only its partisan nature. There is also its apparently unstoppably expansionist character. No matter which party is in power, the business of Washington is to make government bigger—forever. Republicans talk about “limited government.” They then sign on to nearly every scheme to make government bigger and more intrusive. Democrats do the same, of course, but they generally skip the rhetorical foreplay about making government smaller.
One huge difference this time around will be the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE for short, an ad hoc executive initiative that will be overseen by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They outlined their bold plan in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal last week. “Unlike government commissions or advisory committees,” they noted, “we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.” Will they? It would be pretty to think so. Musk has said that he wants to cut government expenditures by $2 trillion. If he could manage even a quarter of that amount, it would be something to write home about. It may seem utopian. But remember, Musk bought Twitter and instantly cut the workforce by 80 percent. He vastly improved the platform, salvaged free speech, and transformed a dying company into a dynamic one.
As usual, the devil will be in the details. Musk and Ramaswamy may identify the ideal candidates for downsizing or elimination. Exactly how will they move from pen to scissors is the $64,000—or rather, the $2 trillion—question. I take solace from the thought that if anyone can do it, the triumvirate of Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy can. Naturally, opposition will be ferocious. Will it also be effective? Time will tell.
I have not yet answered the question posed in my title: “What is the administrative state?” A friend asked me that in the course of our conversation about my column last week. Isn’t it possible, he asked, that “administrative state,” like its scarier sounding cousin, “deep state” is just a polysyllabic synonym for “state,” for the complex activities of government in a complex, technologically advanced polity? Maybe “administrative state” is just an invention of right-wing “conspiracy theorists” who find goblins where there are only harmless bureaucrats?
I nattered on about the growth of the regulatory state, the battalions of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who govern us from their perches in the alphabet soup of modern, Kafkaesque governance, and put in a plug for Tocqueville’s analysis of “democratic despotism.” I also noted that the phrase “conspiracy theorist” is generally used in a prophylactic, not a descriptive sense. That is, it is a phrase that is wheeled out when the aim is to end, not further, the conversation. The problem is not conspiracy theories, but conspiracies in fact.
One example. When revelation of the contents of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” threatened to upend Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, Anthony Blinken asked acting CIA director Michael Morell to organize a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officers stating that the laptop bore all the signs of “Russian disinformation.” Morell did this, he said, in order to give Biden a “talking point” for his forthcoming debate with Donald Trump. The public did not know this at the time. When the truth leaked out, the establishment claimed it was only a “conspiracy theory” put about by Trump supporters. But it wasn’t a conspiracy theory. It was a conspiracy in fact.
I stand by everything I said, but I did not say enough, and what I did say was not precise enough. Formulating definitions is often a mug’s game. This is because, for any important matter, a definition that is true will also have to be so general as to be vacuous or at least unilluminating. What is love? What is virtue? What is knowledge? In everyday life, these chestnuts from the philosophy seminar tend to get assimilated to the indefinite definition Justice Potter Stewart offered for “obscenity”: “I know it when I see it.”
Still, there’s something to be said for making the effort. So here goes. “‘The administrative state’ is that quota of political power that covertly fills the vacuum left by the failure of the legislative branch to discharge its obligations.”
Two things are critical. One is the displacement of sovereignty. No longer are the people sovereign. The bureaucracy is.
The second critical thing is the covert nature of the enterprise. The question “What is the administrative state?” can seem difficult to answer because it is not supposed to exist in the first place. You know it only by its actions. You cannot look it up in the statute book, much less in the Constitution. Indeed, the very fact of the administrative state violates any number of Constitutional norms, not least its being a sort of “fourth branch” of government when the Constitution provides for only three.
Edmund Burke touched on an essential aspect of this process in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770). Criticizing the Court of George III for circumventing Parliament and establishing by stealth what amounted to a new regime of royal prerogative and influence-peddling, Burke saw how George and his courtiers maintained the appearance of parliamentary supremacy while simultaneously undermining it. “It was soon discovered,” Burke wrote with sly understatement, “that the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary Government, were things not altogether incompatible.” That malign co-habitation stands behind the growth of the administrative state. We still vote. We still have a bicameral legislature. But behind these forms of a free government, the essentially undemocratic activities of an increasingly arbitrary and unaccountable regime pursue an expansionist agenda that threatens liberty in the most comprehensive way, by circumventing the law.
The shadowy nature of the administrative state helps to explain why it is so hostile to free speech and, by the same token, why it tends to be receptive to the deployment of censorship and police power to achieve its ends and stymie the ends of its critics. That is why the rise of the administrative state goes hand in hand with the loss of public confidence in society’s guiding institutions. Talk of “democracy” and “our democracy” is ever on their lips. SWAT teams, prosecutorial abuse, and lawfare are out on the street for all to see. Bottom line: The age of the administrative state is at the same time an age of declining legitimacy in the foundational institutions of civil society.
Officially, the administrative state is not supposed to exist. Having people talk about the fact that it does exist and that it often pursues ends that are contrary to the ends of the people outside its magic circle of custodians means that by definition free inquiry is a threat to its perpetuation. That is one reason that the administrative state is so hostile to democracy. It is also an important reason why it must be dismantled and returned to the graveyard of rebarbative systems of political obfuscation and bureaucratic tyranny.
I like this as a working definition of the administrative state. It is exactly the behavior that led Nancy Pelosi to make inane public statements like “we have to pass the bill to see what is in it” – a remark so cringe-worthy that it should never had been uttered. And, let’s be honest, it has been a feature of legislation, not a bug, for legislators that hold radical positions that are not likely to be supported by public opinion. It is, in fact, a way to pursue a deeply suspect agenda and still get reelected.
If any thinking people were concerned about what the Administrative State is the prior four years made them aware that something in Washington smells far more than what was once ripe, and rotten, in Denmark. There is no conspiracy theory that goes far enough to encompass a description better than what the actor Steve McQueen in his movie debut titled “The Blob” managed to convey. Actually it was not the actor but the horrific creature that kept growing by consuming everything in its path whose very simplistic characterization only someone such as Orwell, with a little excessive imagination, beyond that which was already excessive, perhaps enhanced by some current version of legalized marijuana, might do a better job envisioning. Washington DC is the antithesis of what our Republican form of government was originally designed to be; to prevent a superstructure of illegitimate power, defined in Jefferson’s Declaration as the reason colonists decided a Revolution, rather than compliance was the way they had to go. George III was a Conservative based on what todays ruling elite represent.
Let’s all understand that every originalist, every Framer, was so afraid of a big, authoritarian centralized government that they created a Constitution designed to protect the new republic from the evils of government by putting chains around it so it could not grow. The States were where growth was far less restrictive. In fact they were so worried that one year after ratification they again assembled to give us the First Ten Amendments, the Bill of Rights, that belongs to the people and not to the government, to protect them from the government with language that clearly emphasizes specificity and lacks any semblance of ambiguity. You would never know that today. The humongous behemoth thing that keeps growing in Washington is every bit the very thing the Constitution was designed to protect future Americans from. It is now boundless, lawless, intrusive and authoritarian beyond any Founder’s imagination. So how did it happen that the country once defined by Alexis de Tocqueville in his two volume masterpiece managed to change from Founding Principles to what it is today?
Well for one thing Karl Marx was never known to be a threat to both Democracy and individual liberty when de Tocqueville traveled through America. He saw the only threat as British Labor laws. Marx expanded on the concepts behind those laws not logarithmically, to the power of 10, but to the power of a thousand. And all it really took was for anti Constitutionalists to convince the people, via education and a poorly educated media that Founding principles did not matter but slavery and segregation did and that the have nots deserve by birthright, not what they could earn but, instead, whatever the government could confiscate for them. The very Party that was responsible for that philosophy was also the Party responsible for slavery, segregation and now socialism. It offers enhanced solutions using an Administrative State that even Marx and Communist Russia had not considered. In America there was never a Revolution of the proletariat. There was only indoctrination of the masses and a power shift from those to be protected from government, to a government that serendipitously and gradually so to speak came to control them. And who made all this happen? It may have been Vladimir Lenin’s idea to indoctrinate generations but it was Jimmy Carter who gave us the Department of Education to make it easy to indoctrinate the whole country simultaneously via the young and impressionable. But even before that there was enough of the Maxrist agenda passed via FDR and Johnson to make entitlements, not just part of the budget but now the overwhelming part of the budget. And that is where Elon and Vivek plan to concentrate their efforts using DOGE.
One thing that clearly characterizes the Administrative State is not that they just bribe voters with their own money but that they themselves don’t just create and support a DEI based welfare class. They themselves are the biggest recipients of welfare. We don’t need them. The Administrative State is a parasitic animal that feeds upon the productive, which in America, is that great mass of people, described by Al Smith, as the hard working tax payers in the middle, the vast majority that get up each day with same thing in mind… to use their individual liberty to pursue what they and their families need to survive and prosper. The huge Administrative State cannot live without them and in order to be certain of their own survival they control by indoctrination and making more people needy and dependent or resort to what they ostentatiously did 2020. They manufactured the votes needed to secure the power they have no intention of giving up. The wealthiest people in America are those who are part of the Administrative State… a parasitic class like no other.
Excellent article! Unfortunately, the WSJ piece is behind a paywall so I couldn’t get at the meat of it, but I’ll just posit that I’ve already seen “contributions” from a few senators that offer up the standard tropes about wasteful spending on studies. This is small fry and these politicians either know it or they lack the imagination or energy to envision a better nation.
These small cuts are insignificant morsels offered up by these politicians in an effort to distract from the larger objective - a smaller and more limited federal government that performs common tasks very well, and leaves other secondary concerns to the states.
I hope DOGE will attack the federal department and agency bloat through real elimination, draconian cuts, and relocations. DOEd needs to go. DOJ, FBI, and multiple intel organs require significant reform and downsizing. DOD, SECDEF, and COCOMs need restructuring, redirecting, and a GO/FO RIF.
Somehow, cutting the social experimentation and programs from budget authorizations like the NDAA needs to happen. This means passing significant limitations on the size of these bills and a solid framework of prioritizing spends. This won’t be perfect given the time constraints the new administration will work under, but an 80% solution will do strategically.
Further, there needs to be a process to bend the judicial system to the will of the people. Obvious bias and political judges and corrupt courts have been allowed to run roughshod over the Constitution for far too long. This work - unlike that needed above where an ax will do fine - will require careful skill with a scalpel.
Time’s a-wasting.
The Administrative State was what the election was all about. The people v. Goliath and it is amazing that, this time, the people can use the very government it needs to eliminate to achieve their intentions. Trump put together a near perfect team for what needs to be done. The resistance will be enormous and I suspect that, unless the economy begins to benefit everyone, the team must achieve what it can in the next two years, hoping that there are not too many RINOs that block the clear mandate of the majority of voters.
Mr. Kimball, once again with clarity and precision, analyzes the poison of our republic (the administrative state) and the need for an immediate cure. (the national debt is but one symptom of our diseased government).
But as Mr. Kimball notes, actually going about the process of detoxifying our bloated, corrupt government is the proverbial $64 question–or as he puts it, the $2 trillion question. The problem with actually bringing the administrative leviathan to heel is that there is no appetite in DC for this. And DC, as Mr. Kimball ruefully notes, is the seat of government. Its like asking unruly children to mind their manners minus adult supervision.
Regardless what the majority of voters desire, and whatever the dynamic duo of Ramaswamy and Musk propose, if congress does not approve, then no amount of jawboning by President Trump will alter the current status of the cancerous administrative state.
Methinks the eventual solution will be something sudden and extreme such that neither the bureaucracy that resists any change, nor the hoi polloi who long for it, have any control. It will be like a tsunami that suddenly appears and wipes away everything in its path.
Regrettably, as in nature, there will be no discrimination between the just and unjust, or the innocent and the corrupt. But its my feeling that only such an event can force the change that is desperately needed.