While we celebrate our great election victory, we must remember that the real work only now begins. The Republic has been saved, but only if we break from the mistakes of the past. We cannot expect to finish saving the country with the same business-as-usual measures that have doomed Republican administrations over the past many decades.

We must focus on the most pressing issues that have brought the United States to the brink of disaster. The Democrats (with some GOP acquiescence) have accumulated unprecedented power in the executive branch over the past ninety years while amassing a national debt of over 35 trillion dollars. (That debt is too large ever to be repaid.) The Democrats have reduced the legislative branch to a subordinate role while claiming, without irony, that Donald Trump wants to be a dictator.

The sheer size of the executive branch is the greatest enemy of any attempt to cut spending and reign in federal power. Federal agencies hand out money to political allies (bosses) of the Democrats. This money comes back in the form of votes, volunteers, donations, political activism, and protests. The more money the government spends, the more headwinds the GOP will face in trying to fight the political battles necessary to rein in federal spending.

Decades ago, Congress unconstitutionally yielded its legislative power to federal agencies (the executive branch). Congress passes enabling statutes that create the agencies that then formulate their own regulations over the economy and our lives. The agencies are now the lawmakers. That DHS spent its budget on immigrants while leaving insufficient amounts for American hurricane victims in 2024 is but one example. Commentators could not agree on what money had been spent and on whom. Only painstaking investigation might reveal the truth, while the other agencies continue to burn out of control. It is hard to determine or agree upon even so basic an item as the total number of federal agencies that exist. This bloat is compounded by the recent trend of presidents to operate the federal government by executive order instead of through the legislative process. The unpopular electric vehicle mandates, with far-reaching consequences, constitute one such example.

The only real solution would be for President Trump to do what Elon Musk did when Musk bought Twitter. Fire everyone and reveal all documents. That is an oversimplification, but many, many people can be fired and many federal agencies can be terminated. With each termination, the federal executive branch gets a little less powerful. Trump can sell this program by declaring, “I need less power... Take away my power!” While any austerity program will face serious backlash, there is no alternative. A public campaign based on the reduction of Trump’s own power will be hard to fight. The Democrat campaign ads repeatedly claimed that Trump seeks to establish a dictatorship through “Project 2025.” They even claimed, without acknowledging the irony, that a plan to abolish the counterproductive Department of Education would somehow increase Trump’s power. But the truth is hard to deny -- reducing executive branch departments, agencies and employees will reduce the power of any president and take this country further away from dictatorship.

Some Republicans have the silly idea that if we somehow could balance the federal budget, it would not matter how gargantuan that budget or the federal executive branch becomes. Notwithstanding the near impossibility of balancing the ever-growing budget, that notion misses the point entirely. Even if we could somehow find the revenue to pay for this bottomless pit without crippling taxation or destructive inflation, the spending itself is harmful, counterproductive and tyrannical. The activities of the federal agencies have become little more than an arm of Democrat campaigns. Federal efforts in the areas of education, the arts, media, etc. amount to leftist propaganda and grooming of our children. Business regulation has become a method for extracting and rewarding campaign contributions and crippling domestic industries that compete with China and other influential foreign countries. Federal involvement in “health care,” bread and circuses, and other domestic programs have created dependency at the expense of citizenry. Federal law enforcement has ignored real crime and a massive, ongoing invasion while persecuting political opponents of the permanent deep state. The Energy Department exists only to starve our people of fuel and mobility.

The deep state will not cease to exist merely because Biden and Harris will soon leave office. The bureaucrats remain in place from one administration to another. The permanent federal bureaucracy and the money it spends are the deep state. The less of both, the less tyrannical the state will be. The bureaucrats are loyal to the goals of the deep state and hostile to any president that seeks to reduce their (and thus his own) power. They slow walk any reform through their own agencies. They sabotage reform through deep state allies in the media. They quietly work against the mandates of the voters. Even with a Republican president, the deep state grows and the voters become more disillusioned. Even under nominal Republican control, we cannot expect Congress to abolish a meaningful portion of the deep state. Enough Republicans will abandon us to ensure the continuation of the deep state. The only solution will be wholesale terminations as Musk did with Twitter.

The bureaucrats are protected from arbitrary termination by the civil service rules. They will use those rules to appeal their terminations. But they can be isolated and prevented from wreaking their normal havoc while their cases remain pending. The Kennedy-Johnson administration famously used this method to neutralize Otto Otepka of the Department of State for the majority of the 1960s. (The Ordeal of Otto Otepka (Arlington Press, 1969)). The same can be done on a much larger scale.

The new administration must also abandon the practice of using executive orders to usurp Congress’ legislative powers. Trump must issue one executive order on January 20th -- an order repealing all executive orders entered in the previous four years (maybe the Obama years also). Even if any of those orders somehow served a useful purpose, only Congress should address such issues pursuant to the Constitution. We cannot attempt to pick and choose which orders we should repeal because the point would be lost that such orders are unconstitutional. We cannot expect the incoming administration to know about every individual prior order. But the affected holdover bureaucrats will know about and continue to follow them as they undermine Trump’s attempts at reform. Wading into this swamp of executive orders is unnecessary when Trump could issue one order repealing all of them.

We must not rely on the old methods that doomed prior GOP administrations. We must not simply hope that Congress will reduce the increase in federal spending while the media attacks the GOP for “slashing” federal programs. Trump’s inauguration speech must announce to the world that he seeks to reduce his own power. He must follow through with massive layoffs in his own bureaucracies. Otherwise, we might never again see the type of voter mobilization that has given us this opportunity.

Image: At via Hotpot.AI