Tag Archives: The administrative state

The Monster Under The Bed

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I guess screaming that President Trump is a threat to our democracy has not worked as well as predicted (we are a representative republic) since he is not the one jailing his political opponents and ignoring the rulings of the Supreme Court, so the Democrats need a new fear. The new monster under the bed is Project 2025. Project 2025 is simply a conservative wish list put out by the Heritage Foundation that would bring America closer to the country our Founding Fathers envisioned.

The Project 2025 website notes:

“Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” offers both specific proposals for addressing every major issue facing the country and a blueprint for how to restructure each agency to solve those issues.

Among the recommendations in this edition:

    • Restore the integrity of the Department of Justice to ensure accountability by giving the FBI a hard rest, ensuring consistent litigation decisions, and enforcing immigration laws.
    • Solidify our border by restructuring the Department of Homeland Security and its priorities in ways that streamline the immigration process, end unclear immigration visas, and create a more secure immigration process.
    • Break up the Department of Education to strengthen education freedom, enhance parental rights in education, and protect taxpayers from student loan “forgiveness.”

Which of those ideas is objectionable?

The Heritage Foundation posted an article about the effectiveness of the Department of Education in 2019. The article states:

Federal government efforts to improve education have been dismal.

The fact that Common Core didn’t catalyze improvements in the U.S. isn’t surprising. Large-scale government programs rarely, if ever, do. 

The sooner we can acknowledge that improvements will not come from Washington, the sooner we’re likely to see students flourishing in learning environments.

…Heritage’s Jonathan Butcher and I detail Yuval Levin’s theory of government failure in “The Not-So-Great Society.” Levin explains that large-scale government programs fail for three reasons:

    1. “Institutionally, the administrative state is ‘dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety.’”
    2. “Culturally and morally, government efforts to ‘rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility [have] undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government.’”
    3. “Fiscally, large-scale federal programs supporting the welfare state are simply unaffordable, ‘dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.’”

Federal government efforts to improve education have been dismal. Even if there were a constitutional basis for its involvement—which there isn’t—the federal government is simply ill-positioned to determine what education policies will best serve the diverse local communities across our vast nation.

The sooner we can acknowledge that improvements will not come from Washington, the sooner we’re likely to see students flourishing in learning environments that reflect their unique needs and desires.

Let’s restore “equal justice under the law,” secure the border, and bring education back to the local district where it can be properly guided. These are not radical ideas, but don’t expect the mainstream media to tell you that.

Anything the government touches gets worse.

To quote Milton Friedman:

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Losing The Battle Against The Administrative State

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On June 24th, The American Thinker posted an article titled, “A Century of Impotency: Conservative Failure and the Administrative State.” I hate that title, but it is true. The article makes the case that Conservatives have failed to restrain the administrative state because they have accepted that it is a necessary governmental innovation required by the complexity of modern society. Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is a long article, but I will quote a few very important points here,

The article notes:

James Landis is widely credited with crafting the theoretical architecture supporting President Roosevelt’s radical reconstruction—and expansion—of the federal government. Landis shrewdly both established and legitimized the regulatory state, including Roosevelt’s creation of new federal administrative agencies, by offering the regulatory state as the solution to the problem of modern governance: the administrative state “is, in essence, our generation’s answer to the inadequacy of the judicial and legislative process.” The Landis premise took concrete shape through Roosevelt’s expansion of the regulatory state, and in doing so, it brought to fruition Woodrow Wilson’s progressive intellectual project: rule by experts, insulated from the popular will

Landis believed the “the administrative process” for which he advocated would “spring from the inadequacy of a simply tripartite form of government to deal with modern problems” because modern problems were simply too large and complex to be entrusted to the system based on the separation of powers instituted by our nation’s founders. Landis framed this innovation as consistent with separation of powers principles because he believed the separation of powers called both for separation but also coordination among the branches, and he saw the administrative state as essential to creating that coordination:

“If the doctrine of separation of power implies division, it also implies balance, and balance calls for equality. The creation of administrative power may be the means for the preservation of that balance, so that paradoxically enough, though it may seem in theoretic violation of the doctrine of the separation of powers, it may in matter of fact be the means for the preservation of the content of that doctrine.”

Please follow the link to read the article for further explanation. I think we have diagnosed the problem. The question is, “What are we going to do about it?”