Writing eight years ago in USA Today, I cheered: “President Trump’s proposed budget takes a big step towards draining the swamp in Washington. This is the first time since the Reagan era that a president has sought a wholesale demolition of boondoggles.” The Washington Post fretted that under Trump’s first budget, “government would be smaller and less involved in regulating life in America.”
Well, that didn’t happen.
In his first term, Trump was initially thwarted and then mostly routed by the permanent Washington regime. His victory last November provides an epic rematch with the administrative state [or Deep State – whatever term AIER prefers] even better than the final Ali-Frazier Thrilla in Manila. [[if the 1975 boxing reference is archaic or would mystify too many readers, zap it]]
In his second term, Trump and Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team are vigorously purging federal deadwood. Washington is howling and some federal judges seem determined to rescue every shiftless civil servant in the land.
DOGE is savvily exposing the villainies and follies of agencies targeted for elimination or radical downsizing. Thanks to DOGE, the credibility of the US Agency for International Development collapsed faster than the East German regime after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Musk is already talking about setting loose the DOGE hounds to discover what happened to the hundreds of billions of dollars of US aid to Ukraine. If that occurs, the results could be far more embarrassing for President Zelenskyy than his recent Oval Office meltdown.
Can Trump and Musk achieve victory over entrenched bureaucracies beloved by the media and much of Congress? Will DOGE triumph where plenty of prior presidents blundered and backtracked?
Late in the nineteenth century, “President Grover Cleveland determined to weed out the incompetent… from the federal service. An order was given to dismiss these useless employees, and when it became known… Senators and Representatives thronged the White House and insisted upon a revocation of the order,” as James Beck related in his 1933 classic, Our Wonderland of Bureaucracy. President Cleveland caved—the first triumph of the newly-formed federal civil service over the White House.
Sheer political deceit explains much of the apparent failure to curb government power. As a presidential candidate in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt condemned deficit spending and then opened the federal spending floodgates wider than ever after he arrived in the White House. FDR also promised not to confiscate gold owned by American citizens but he betrayed that pledge as part of his pursuit of inflation as a panacea. FDR steamrolled the Supreme Court, resulting in endless rulings practically presuming that any economic regulation or decree had a “rational basis” as long as legislators did not explicitly proclaim they were nullifying constitutional rights.
In 1968, the Republican Party Platform howled: “An entrenched, burgeoning bureaucracy has increasingly usurped powers, unauthorized by Congress.” The GOP called for radical reforms to “preserve personal liberty” and “improve efficiency.” But after Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he created the Environmental Protection Agency, which continues to epitomize arbitrary power and sow havoc throughout the land. Nixon vastly expanded the welfare state with his 1969 promise to “end hunger in America for all time.” Food stamp enrollment increased eightfold under Nixon. But a deluge of free food failed to end demands for more handouts. Nixon’s failure was confirmed two years later when President Joe Biden pledged at a White House Summit “to end hunger in this country by the year 2030.”
In 1980, Ronald Reagan ran the last major party presidential campaign that explicitly condemned federal power as a peril to individual liberty. In his 1981 first inaugural address, Reagan proclaimed, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Reagan bloated federal power with one moralistic crusade after another, including expanding a war on drugs that helped quadruple America’s prison population and gutted the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless unreasonable searches. Reagan did nothing to curb the power of federal prosecutors, IRS agents, or environmental tinhorn dictators.
Reagan did roll back federal power in a few niches. But at the end of his presidency, William Niskanen, his former chief economic advisor and chairman of the Cato Institute, raised the white flag: “Deregulation seems to be one of those things where the political costs are higher than the payoffs.” By explicitly abandoning the traditional Republican opposition to deficit spending, Reagan paved the path to our current $36 trillion national debt.
President Bill Clinton was a master of “bait and switch” government reform. He announced a National Performance Review of federal agencies in 1993 to create a government that “works better and costs less.” The federal employee headcount was slightly reduced thanks primarily to the “peace dividend” of the end of the Cold War. The Clinton administration also offered lavish early pensions to many bureaucrats, assuring that they would be treated better in perpetuity than the taxpayers who supported their leisure. Clinton and Gore announced hundreds of goals and new standards but many were farces or shams. Vice President Gore announced that no one would have to wait more than five minutes for service at Post Offices. The Postal Service continued providing miserable service but fulfilled the Clinton-Gore mandate by removing the wall clocks from almost all Post Office lobbies – thus making it harder for people to know how long they waited. The Clinton administration also pledged that “your local first class mail will be delivered overnight.” The Postal Service responded by radically narrowing the definition of “local,” continuing its perennial intentional mail slowdowns.
In his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton sought to snare support from Republicans by proclaiming that “the era of Big Government is over.” After he won re-election by campaigning as a moderate, he unleashed a dizzying array of spending and power grabs. In his 1997 State of the Union address, Clinton called for a “national crusade for education standards” and federal standards and national credentials for all new teachers; announced plans “to build a citizen army of one million volunteer tutors to make sure every child can read independently by the end of the third grade”; called for $5 billion in federal aid to build and repair local school houses, a new scholarship program to subsidize anyone going to college, a $10,000 tax deduction for all tuition payments after high school, and federal subsidies for private health insurance; demanded a new law entitling women who have had mastectomies to stay in the hospital 48 hours afterwards; advocated a constitutional amendment for “victims’ rights”; urged Congress to enact a law criminalizing any parent who crossed a state line allegedly to avoid paying child support; and proposed enacting juvenile crime legislation that “declares war on gangs,” hiring new prosecutors, and increasing federal spending on the war on drugs. Clinton also demanded that “character education must be taught in our schools” but he dropped that proposal after the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupted.
In 2000, the Republican Party Platform proclaimed: “Since the election of 1860, the Republican Party has had a special calling — to advance the founding principles of freedom and limited government.” But President George W. Bush was more enthused on domineering public schools with his No Child Left Behind Act, vastly expanding Medicare, and boosting reckless mortgage lending that helped wreck the housing market. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush acted as if any limit on his power meant that the terrorists won.
Trump’s current campaign to leash Leviathan is benefitting from widespread support from conservative writers and activists who view Trump’s own power as the best safeguard for American freedom. The New York Times noted a similar pattern in 1973 at the start of Nixon’s second term: “Conservatives who have traditionally favored a strong Congress and a weakened Presidency are now advocating the reverse.” Nixon’s attempt to fix the federal government by radically centralizing power in the White House did not survive the Watergate scandal.
Are Trump’s lawyers toying with legal nitroglycerine? The Trump administration is echoing the George W. Bush administration’s “unitary executive theory” to assert that the president effectively has untrammeled power over every executive branch employee. President Bush issued more than a hundred signing statements announcing that he would disregard specific provisions in legislation, thanks to “the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information” from Congress and the American people. Bush used that invocation to justify scorning congressional prohibitions on torture. The Bush administration presumed that “checks and balances” were archaic. But Bush’s legal power grabs helped make him intensely unpopular by the end of his reign and opened the door for Barack Obama to win the presidency by masquerading as a civil liberties savior.
At this point, Trump and Musk are effectively using sweeping discretion to curtail the number of federal employees and euthanize brain-dead agencies. Their courage and resolution is a refreshing contrast to the usual useless Republican antics in Washington. But will their precedents prove perilous if the next president seeks to sweep away their positive achievements and deluge the nation with new intrusive decrees?
Hopefully, Trump, Musk, and DOGE will continue electrifying and enraging Americans with one head-snapping federal horror story after another. More than ever, we need that “wholesale demolition of boondoggles.” The latest fight to leash Leviathan can’t afford to fail because America has no more liberties and no more trillions of dollars to spare.