The big shrink

By James S. Fay

The current federal government is a Leviathan — too incompetent, costly, duplicitous, arrogant, powerful, and partisan, and far too dangerous. Bureaucratic contempt for Congress, truth, fiscal restraint, the private sector, tradition, federalism, democracy, and the Constitution has created a governance and a budgetary crisis. After recent scandals in the Department of Education, the IRS, the V.A., the Justice Department, the Patent Office, USAID, the FBI, the Secret Service, the Treasury, and the State Department, hardly anyone believes that the federal government is competent.

In late 2023, a Gallup poll found that public trust in the federal government was near its historic low. Fifty-five percent of the population had little or no confidence in it.

More is required than simply downsizing the bureaucratic colossus. A new administration could quickly reverse a temporary reduction in numbers. We need a massive but thoughtful assault on the entire bureaucratic way of doing business, an assault to transform and shrink the government, an assault launched on multiple fronts. We must create a much smaller government that carefully picks its limited responsibilities and works to achieve them.

The battle plan to create this permanently leaner government should take the following approach.

The Big Freeze

President Trump has launched the first salvo by announcing a federal hiring freeze, with an exception for the military. This freeze is the first part of a multi-year big chill in Washington. This chill will apply to government regulations, pay raises, promotions, travel, grants, advertising, conferences, remodeling and redecorating, and outside consultants. The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is well underway to oversee this shrinkage campaign. Of course, there should be prudent but limited exceptions for essential national security, public safety, and health.

New Executive Authority

Working closely with Congress during the budget reconciliation process, the president should request one simple law granting him broad authority to downsize and reorganize the entire national government. This legislation would anchor the president’s executive orders. The primary justification for this new authority would be the budget deficit crisis hanging over the country.

Judicial Exemption

It took only days for activist judges to start issuing a series of injunctions to undermine DOGE initiatives. As with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act of 1973, the president should ask Congress to exempt his downsizing initiative from judicial review. Without such an exemption, activist judges can quickly bring the budget reform initiative to its knees as government employee unions, liberal activists, and trial lawyers storm into the courts to frustrate reform and protect the status quo.

The activists understand that everything stays the same in a properly run political swamp.

Transfer of Powers to the States

Our Founding Fathers in the 18th century established the United States as a decentralized federal system. This system was necessary and appropriate due to the great distances between the national capital and the states. Decentralization was also relevant due to the primitive methods of communication used. Finally, the colonists were escaping from a highly centralized European monarchical system. They wanted to avoid replicating that system in North America. “One size fits all” was never appropriate during this page of American history and will not be applicable in the foreseeable future.

Although distance and communication issues are no longer relevant to the relationship between the national government and the states, the vastness of a country with five time zones (excluding U.S. possessions); different economic interests; and significant cultural, religious, ethnic, and political concentrations makes a decentralized and flexible political system congruent with the needs of 21st-century America.

Therefore, a central element of the shrinkage reform movement should be transferring most of the policymaking outside national security and foreign policy to the states. There is no reason why education, health care, environmental and economic regulation, and criminal and civil law cannot be sensibly, flexibly, and economically administered by state and local governments. This new order would allow states, counties, and cities to cooperate when needed.

The Legacy of Slavery

For more than a half-century, the American left has worshiped national power, primarily because national power was essential, for a time, to overcome the legacy of slavery, which permeated much of the American South as well as the North. Slavery had to be expunged by the power of the national government, starting with the Truman and Eisenhower administrations in the 1940s and 1950s.

The legal and cultural legacy of slavery has, for the most part, been purged over the past few decades because of changing public attitudes and national legislative, administrative, and legal decisions. So the federal government's dominant role over the states no longer has the legitimacy the past half-century may have conferred.

The appropriate default status for the United States is for the state and local governments and the private sector to shape and administer policy locally for local needs, with minimal interference by the government in Washington.

The battle to reform and shrink the federal colossus began with the shock and awe of executive orders during the week of the president’s inauguration. We are in the first weeks of a long war against generations of bureaucratic bloat. The principled reformers will have to overcome not only the entrenched interests in Washington, but also a legion of bureaucrats, unions, lawyers, and their allies in the universities, Hollywood, and the media.

Buckle up!

James S. Fay is a semi-retired attorney, political scientist, writer, and college administrator. His articles have appeared in social science and law journals, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and Real Clear Defense. He served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer in Germany. He has worked in both the public and private sectors.