The federal bureaucracy has ballooned from a few agencies to more than 400, many of which are \u201cindependent\u201d of the president. Americans often view the president as responsible for the actions those agencies take. The system nudges new presidents to give up and go along. And that\u2019s exactly what they\u2019ve done. No president\u2014not Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan\u2014has cracked this nut. Most reforms have made the administrative state larger, not smaller.<\/a><\/p>\nAs we\u2019re seeing now, substantial opposition awaits anyone who challenges the bureaucracy. Unions are powerful. Intimidation from those with institutional knowledge can be overwhelming. Fear of the media has also been a deterrent to action. Every president has been at least somewhat fearful of the intelligence agencies. Industry leaders who have captured the agencies, including many campaign donors, have been too powerful to unseat or control.<\/p>\n
Countless cabinet secretaries come and go with the intention of changing the system. They get big offices, a nice portrait and social status, but the bureaucrats know that the political appointees are temporary and easily can be ignored. …<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the American people feel increasingly oppressed, taxed, regulated, spied on, browbeaten, hectored and harassed. Voting never made a difference because the politicians no longer controlled the system. The bureaucracies rule all. We\u2019ve come to know this in our gut, which is why voters\u2019 trust in the system has eroded as agencies\u2019 power has built up.<\/p>\n
The Biden years underscored this point. We didn\u2019t even need a conscious or active president, only a figurehead. Behind the scenes, institutions ran everything.<\/p>\n
********************************<\/p>\n
The message from today\u2019s civic elites is that the president\u2019s job is to pretend to be in charge while doing nothing meaningful. Shut up. Don\u2019t disturb the administrative state. Let it keep doing its thing without oversight or disruption, and you\u2019ll get your library and bestselling memoir.<\/p>\n
Mr. Trump refuses this deal. In his second term, he\u2019s determined to slay the bureaucratic beast he knows all too well from his first term and the Biden years. DOGE\u2019s efforts are epic, breaking more than a century of acquiescence to the deep state. The Trump team is courageously confronting the problem head-on, come what may. Mr. Trump\u2019s allies know that they must act quickly and with some degree of ferocity, even recklessness, lest we default back to the status quo of leaders who pretend to be in charge while the embedded \u201cmen of the system\u201d\u2014to adapt a phrase from Adam Smith\u2014run things behind closed doors.<\/p>\n
Mr. Jeffrey Tucker is president of the Brownstone Institute.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good article from the Journal. The federal bureaucracy has ballooned from a few agencies to more than 400, many of which are \u201cindependent\u201d of the president. Americans often view the president as responsible for the actions those agencies take. The system nudges new presidents to give up and go along. And that\u2019s exactly what they\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7012,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/7012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomfarandasfolly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}