We do not live in anything resembling the nation that was envisioned by our Founders, and for the first time in modern American history, we seem to have reached a consensus in recognizing that fact.
This was just dramatically evidenced in a presidential election, in which a broad coalition of voters from the political left and right voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, who promised to create a “government efficiency commission” to be headed by Elon Musk.
How a “government efficiency commission” could become the emphatic demand of a populace that I watched vote for an unquestionable expansion of the federal government during the Obama years is a sobering thing.
The Tea Party wasn’t cool when Barack Obama was thought to be cool.
But nowadays, Barack Obama’s hectoring of the “brothers” for not getting on the trolley in supporting Kamala Harris has made him the farthest thing from cool, yet the Tea Party’s idea about shrinking the federal government couldn’t be cooler.
This “commission” has taken life as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is both a funny reference to a meme-coin involving Elon Musk and, more importantly, the greatest and most necessary idea in modern American history.
As Charlie Kirk writes on X, the “creation of DOGE will be the first federal program whose goal it is to eliminate itself. It exists to shrink government, not grow it.”
“This is a profound, historic step back to the Founders’ vision for America,” he continues.
As it hasn’t been authorized or funded by Congress, it won’t actually be a “federal program” at this point. But that doesn’t matter. Kirk couldn’t be more correct on that final point about this being entirely consistent with the Founders’ vision for a limited federal government, and Elizabeth Warren steps on a rake to prove him right. On X, she writes that the “Office of Government Efficiency is off to a great start with split leadership: two people to do the work of one person.”
Musk responds that, unlike Warren, neither he nor Vivek Ramaswamy are being paid for their service, “so it is very efficient indeed,” further suggesting that “DOGE will do great things for the American people. Let history be the judge.”
The first thing that should stand out in this exchange is not Musk’s philanthropic nature in this endeavor, which is certainly more reflective of the Founders’ notion about public service, but his preemptive acceptance of eventual accountability.
When was the last time you’ve ever heard anyone close to government or politics suggest that they would be entirely willing to accept blame for potential failure? This is a refreshing proclamation for most Americans. Warren and her fellow Congressmen on both sides of the aisle, on the other hand, desire no accountability for their own performance. That’s why they continue to rely upon unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats to grow their power and influence in government by confiscating trillions of dollars from law-abiding, taxpaying citizens.
It has become all-too apparent to most Americans on both sides of the political aisle that this bloated organism in Washington, D.C., comprised of unelected federal bureaucracies, extends its tendrils ever more expensively and invasively into Americans’ lives, and without the consent of the governed.
America was designed to be a nation of laws. But as political scientist Theodore Lowi said as early as the 1970s, liberalism is “hostile to law” and prefers “policy without law.” The legislature’s creation of shadowy bureaucratic agencies as a substitute for making law allowed for circumvention of the Founders’ intent.
Lowi observed, writes Mark Steyn in After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) were “set up by a Congress that didn’t identify a single policy goal for these agencies and ‘provided no standards whatsoever’ for their conduct.”
“Where do you go to vote out the CPSC or OSHA?” Steyn asks. You can’t, of course, and while that’s obviously the point today, it was apparently less obvious back then. Unelected, unaccountable, faceless bureaucrats have been given multi-billion-dollar budgets by Congress to craft policies that infringe upon even the most mundane aspects of American life.
Steyn recalls that the “end-of-life counseling” language (i.e., death panels, or that maybe you’d be better off “taking a painkiller,” according to Barack Obama) was eventually stripped from 2010’s wildly unpopular Obamacare legislation after it became public knowledge. But that doesn’t really matter, Steyn says, because there are over 1,000 references within the bill to all the things that the Secretary of Health and Human Services “shall” or “may” determine.
“Plucked at random,” says Steyn, quoting the 2,000-page Affordable Care Act of 2010 that no legislator ever read: “The Secretary shall develop oral healthcare components that shall include tooth-level surveillance.”
“From colonial subjects to dentured servants in a mere quarter-millennium,” Steyn quips about the ridiculously Orwellian notion of “tooth-level surveillance” by the federal government. And again, he asks, “where do you go to vote out 'the Secretary'?”
In 2024, for myriad reasons that will be discussed for decades, Americans somehow finally got wise to the ruse. Tea Partiers and Occupy Wall Streeters banded together, unified by one undeniable realization: the federal government is pretending to be something that it isn’t.
This parasitic and destructive organism in Washington, D.C., has done everything it could to hide its nature from the public, while pretending to be the thing that our American Founders envisioned.
And most of us now, Left and Right, are wise to it. Sure, longtime Republican voters like me might have balked at cutting wasteful defense spending in 2010. And sure, Democrat voters might have become infuriated at the idea of cutting wasteful and ineffective agencies like the Department of Education back in 2016.
But here we stand today, as a ragtag coalition of rebels, wielding a flamethrower, which is the only thing that we know can destroy some of these agencies for good.
The administrative state in D.C. is desperate and scared. We are seeing the signs of this, in the Fed potentially lowering interest rates in spite of a weak job market and rising inflation. This would unnecessarily yield stagflation that could be blamed on the Trump administration.
And in terms of foreign policy, the Department of Defense will be handing Donald Trump a grenade with a pulled pin when Joe Biden confusedly shuffles out of office in 2025. The Biden administration will have escalated the war beyond anything in most of our lifetimes by directly providing missiles and authorizing deep strikes by Ukraine into Russian territory.
While I, like most people, am not in favor of Russian aggression in Ukraine, imagine, for a moment, that the United States had a territorial dispute with Mexico, and that Russia provided and authorized long-range missiles to strike deep in America’s heartland. Would we respond in some other way than to assume this to be a direct act of war?
Americans are winning against the big government threat in our own country, but we haven’t won yet. The malignant Deep State has been identified and openly targeted for eradication. We should only expect that its efforts to maintain its own existence become more desperate from here.