By Steve Huntley

December 1, 2024

It’s the stuff dreams are made of.

The dreams, that is, of conservatives and libertarians yearning for a return to small government.

And maybe also the dreams of millions of Americans fed up with government censorship of social media. Fed up with government lawfare against everyone from Donald Trump to parents protesting woke policies at school board meetings. Fed up with the so-called government experts whose imperious dictates mangled our society in the name of the Covid pandemic.

Trump says he’s ready to tackle the leviathan in Washington and has tasked two of America’s most prominent and successful entrepreneurs to bring the wisdom and common sense of the private marketplace to government. To cut Washington’s colossal administrative state down to size. To make it more efficient. To streamline it. But also to restrain it. To get its too-interfering fingers out of our lives. To return to Congress the responsibility for specifying the laws that hit close to home with us.

“Drain the swamp” is how Trump describes the job he’s given to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a lawyer/investment guru and one-time presidential candidate. They will head the Department of Government Efficiency, called DOGE.

Their declared goal — save the country half a trillion dollars through cuts in government programs, through staff reductions in the vast Washington bureaucracy and through slashing government regulations.

How big is their challenge?

Immense.

The full-time government work force numbers around 2.3 million, who pull down $271 billion in salaries. The total employment count reaches three million when part-time workers and contractors are included.

By comparison, America’s biggest private employer, Walmart, has 1.6 million people on its payroll.

The Federal Register, the record of government regulations and rules, runs more than 90,000 pages. (It’s been higher — nearly 95,900 pages when Barack Obama was president, according to Forbes magazine.)

The Federal Register is fed rules, regulations, and decrees by some 400 departments and agencies. Some of them are big and well known, others are small, and there likely are a number of them most of us have probably never heard of. But all work at infiltrating the decisions of faceless bureaucrats into myriad avenues of American life.

Think of the Labor Department writing rules and regulations affecting 165 million workers. Think of the federal government’s mandate (soon to be overturned by Trump) to demand electric cars constitute an ever-growing share of the vehicles manufactured by automakers. Or consider gender dictates leading to men stealing athletic trophies from women.

And, again, will any of us ever forget the Covid mandates closing schools? Or shutting down churches while celebrating big Black Lives Matter gatherings? Or kicking soldiers out of the army and nurses out of hospitals for not getting vaccines?

All that built up a flood of feelings among everyday Americans that things are out of control, that government is just too big and too intrusive.

Taming the giant administrative state won’t be easy.

Musk and Ramaswamy will be running an advisory commission. They’ll have no authority of their own to do anything.

They will make recommendations to Trump, to his cabinet and to Congress. It will be up to them to implement whatever the DOGE comes up with.

Given his natural inclinations, Trump will be on board. But many other things — the latest international crisis, for example — will be demanding his attention.

His cabinet heads should be on board too. But history offers tales of political appointees being captured by the bureaucracy they are tasked to reform. Scores of high-ranking pencil-pushers will be eager to whisper in a cabinet secretary’s ears how important this or that function of their agency is.

The challenge of reigning in the Washington colossus will be tougher in Congress. From the start, Democrats will battle against it. They like big government. Most of them are all in on “experts” issuing orders for the rest of us to bow down to.

But even Republicans will find the job at times a bridge too far. As President Ronald Reagan once put it, “Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

The simple truth is that every federal program and every bureaucratic organization has a constituency, Americans who indeed see value in them.

The big government unions will swarm Capitol Hill peddling arguments about why, for example, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is absolutely vital to environmental protection of the seas.

Or the Washington aristocracy will assert the Commission on Fine Arts has a vital mission “to advise the federal government on matters pertaining to the arts and national symbols, and to guide the architectural development” of D.C.

And sometimes maybe they’ll be right.

Some of the targets of small-government advocates could turn out to be just too big to bring down.

The Education Department is a prime target for anyone out to cut Washington down to size. That agency has spent a fortune to achieve little if anything to advance the education of America’s children.

The very idea of eliminating an entire federal department would have heads exploding in every corner of Washington.

Another idea is to move some departments out of D.C.

For example, an Agriculture Department headquartered in, say, Iowa would be closer to the people it serves. Again, that’s a big idea that would be a heavy lift.

Such a transfer would no doubt bring a lot of resignations by bureaucrats who couldn’t imagine leaving the friendly, sophisticated environs of Washington to live among the rubes in the hinterland.

Legions of bureaucrats are still working from home, an artifact of the Covid shutdowns. Just ordering them to show up at the office might spark mass resignations. We can only hope.

Any DOGE proposals for staff reductions will run into the wall of Civil Service Act protections and loud opposition from government unions. That makes reform hard, but not impossible.

In considering all the obstacles Musk and Ramaswamy face, we shouldn’t forget that this has been tried before.

In President Reagan’s time, the Grace Commission, like DOGE strictly an advisory body, sifted through the maze of the federal universe and came up with a passel of recommendations. Most of them went nowhere.

Some of us are old enough to remember another election that delivered a new bunch of Republicans to Congress committed to smaller government. It prompted then-President Bill Clinton to declare, “The era of big government is over.”

Guess what? It wasn’t.

Trump has even tried this before. In his first term, one of his first executive orders demanded that for every new regulation, two old ones had to be junked.

The initial results were encouraging. The number of pages in the Federal Register in 2017 fell to 61,300, according to Forbes magazine.

However, by the time he left office, that total was back up to more than 86,000 in 2020 — still 9,500 fewer pages than Obama’s record high.

Maybe this time will be different. Maybe America isn’t only ready for reform, it’s eager to see it happen.

This last election threw up a lot of rhetoric about threats to democracy.

The great mass of us are waking up to the realization that this threat comes not from Trump or Kamala Harris or some other political candidate.

It comes from our elected officials abdicating responsibility to a mass of unelected, unaccountable, imperious so-called experts who think they know better than us, who see us as a bunch of yokels who don’t know what’s good for ourselves.

As Musk and Ramaswamy put it recently: “Most legal edicts aren’t laws enacted by Congress but ‘rules and regulations’ promulgated by unelected bureaucrats — tens of thousands of them each year. Most government enforcement decisions and discretionary expenditures aren’t made by the democratically elected president or even his political appointees but by millions of unelected, unappointed civil servants ….”

There’s nothing democratic about that picture.

The administrative state has grown so big and powerful that this may be our last chance to bring it to heel, to make the words “public servant” actually mean something, to end the nightmare of an ever-more intrusive unelected, unaccountable administrative state.

It’s a chance we don’t want to miss.

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Steve Huntley, a retired Chicago journalist now living in Austin, Texas, has contributed other pieces to johnkassnews.com from an examination of the secret jail for Christopher Columbus and other politically problematic public art to an essay on Americans suffering from Joe Biden gas pain.

For almost three decades Huntley spent most of his career in Chicago journalism at the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was a feature writer, metro reporter, night city editor, metropolitan editor, editorial page editor and a columnist for the opinion pages.

Before that he was a reporter and editor with United Press International (UPI) in the South and Chicago, and Chicago bureau chief and a senior editor in Washington with U.S. News & World Report. Northwestern University Press has issued soft cover and eBook editions of Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America by Truman K. Gibson Jr. with Steve Huntley, a memoir of a Chicagoan who was a member of President Roosevelt’s World War II Black Cabinet working to desegregate the military.