It has become a tradition that when a Democrat occupies the White House, a bronze bust of Winston Churchill, historically displayed in the Oval Office, goes into storage, and when a Republican occupies the White House, it returns.
For the second time, Donald Trump has restored the bust to its place of honor, and it is fitting that Trump should honor Churchill in this way. Churchill is the great statesman of the twentieth century not only for the great good he did during the Second World War, but for his wise opposition to the emerging trend of all-encompassing bureaucracy that has entangled so many Western nations.
America is entangled in this sort of government — an infinitely complicated apparatus whose workings are unknown, whose works are so vast as to be unknowable, and which seems too often to answer to no one. All that a citizen can know for sure is that this machine moves in mysterious ways and according to its own devices.
Churchill opposed this de-humanizing bureaucracy because it fills us with “a sense of vacancy and of fatuity, of incompleteness.” It offers people the apparent comfort of not having to make the hard choices that are the essence of self-government, but in the process, it denies people the dignity that comes from governing oneself well.
Churchill saw this trend but could not unwind it. Trump might start the unwinding process.
In his first month in office, Trump has fought more aggressively against bureaucratic control than his predecessors. His recent orders show not only zeal, but the technical knowledge needed to put it to good use.
Trump seems to know that the bureaucracy’s nature is to grow. As it pulls more and more of daily life into its maw, it needs more rules and manpower to digest and reorder it. A few hundred bureaucrats become a few million, a few thousand rules become a few billion. The first step in reform must be to stop its growth.
To that end, Trump has ordered the maw closed. Right after taking office, he ordered a regulatory freeze while his administration reviews the Biden-era rules still in the pipeline. A prudent move, because Joe Biden expanded the regulators’ reach more than any president before him. He set the national record for regulatory costs, imposing in four years three-and-a-half times the regulatory costs that Barack Obama imposed in eight. In his last year in office, Biden’s administration set the record for most pages published in the Federal Register in a year: 107,262. Laid end-to-end that’s 18.6 miles of paper.
A temporary freeze is helpful, but not sufficient. Churchill warned that “if you make ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law,” and we blew past that number long ago. A broader reconsideration of whether and when federal power should be used is needed. To that end, Trump has issued a “10-to-1” order requiring that “for each new regulation issued, at least 10 prior regulations be identified for elimination.” The point is to make sure that “the cost of planned regulation is responsibly managed.” Hopefully “cost” includes not only the price tag in dollars and cents, but also the unquantifiable cost of the “sense of incompleteness” that an all-encompassing bureaucracy imposes on people when it takes away their ability to govern themselves.
The bureaucracy’s will to control requires hands to pull the levers of power, and so the bureaucracy expands over time. It is now the largest employer in the country, and one of the largest on earth. To stop this growth, Trump immediately imposed a hiring freeze on the government. For at least three months, no vacant civilian position may be filled, and no new ones may be created, except as required by law.
A hiring freeze is no permanent solution. And a permanent freeze is not a prudent solution, for there is much that the federal government must still do. It is easy to misunderstand the goal of reform. The goal is not to demolish the federal government, but to reform it so that it does well what it can do well and does not do what it does poorly, nor what local governments can do just as well or better. That sort of reform will require shrinking parts of the bureaucratic apparatus, reorganizing others, and maybe even expanding a select few.
The point is that a freeze can only be the start. Trump seems to know this too. His hiring freeze and his order creating a Workforce Optimization Initiative require the civilian agencies to craft plans to reorganize the federal government so that it more efficiently uses “existing personnel and funds to improve public services and the delivery of these services.” The point is not to destroy but to “make reallocations to meet the highest priority needs, maintain essential services, and protect national security, homeland security, and public safety.”
The bureaucracy’s tendency toward unchecked growth is one thing, its will to be independent of the American people, another. Independence from the people is not compatible with our Constitution nor with the principles of good, stable, and trusted governance. So Trump has issued orders to make the bureaucracy more responsive to the people.
He did this first with simple sunlight. Trump has ordered “radical transparency” about what the government does with the peoples’ money. His Department of Government Efficiency has uncovered billions of dollars of ideologically motivated spending, all of it contentious, none of it debated or approved by the people. Instead, a handful of bureaucrats, making decisions without the people’s considered judgment, handed out the taxpayers’ dollars to pet projects that a great many people would have opposed, had they known. Now, all agencies must make those grants known. Another order requires agencies to consider the national interest — rather than bureaucrats’ personal or ideological interests — when giving grants to non-governmental organizations.
Trump’s most important order — and the one that best demonstrates his technical knowledge of bureaucracy — is called “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies.” It makes even the most distant agencies responsive to the people through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA is a little agency that does a huge amount of good. OIRA reviews significant regulations to make sure that they align with the president’s goals. In that way, it makes the bureaucracy responsive to the people through their chosen president.
In the past, not all agencies submitted their regulations to OIRA. The “independent” agencies did not. Those are agencies structured specifically to avoid presidential influence. The president may appoint some of their leaders, but after that, he has less control over what they do. But their independence is fiction. They are somewhat independent of the president (although he retains many tools to bend them to his will), but they are not independent of ideological factions. Nobody could say that the Securities and Exchange Commission under Gary Gensler behaved as a neutral, apolitical organization. Neither could anyone say that about the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan, nor the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Rohit Chopra. All were captured by ideology, and none heard or responded to the people’s considered judgment about its actions.
That will change, for now. Trump’s order requires even those agencies to submit their significant regulations to OIRA and forbids them from taking any legal positions contrary to those of the President and Attorney General who are the only federal officers who may “provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.” They will now respond to the people’s judgment insofar as it is embodied in their choice of President.
That is an improvement over faceless bureaucracy, but responsiveness through the president is still not ideal. Congress, much more so than the president who is represents the people’s considered judgment. Congress is deliberative, the president, decisive, and deliberation, not decisiveness, produces good laws. But Congress has given up its oversight of agencies, and responsiveness through the president is the best we can hope for until Congress picks up the reins it dropped.
As mentioned above, prudent reform may require expanding some agencies. OIRA is one such agency. With a permanent staff of only about 45 people, it was stretched thin even before Trump’s latest order. Now, it will be stretched even more, and so a proper reform of the federal government would see it expand even as other agencies would shrink.
But for all reforms, the animating principle ought to be this: that the federal government should do only what it alone can do well, leaving to local governments and civic organizations what they can do equally well or better. Otherwise, as Churchill said, the government will sap the people’s spirit, leaving them with only “subhuman goals and ideals.”