This year’s 250th birthday celebrations should have reminded us that Americans are a people with a government and not the other way around.
Big government is a fearful master. In one of his State of the Union speeches, President Bill Clinton famously said, “The era of big government is over.” Today’s leftists never got that message. They love big government, almost as much as they despise President Donald Trump. They call him an authoritarian.
But authoritarians take power and freedoms from their people. They make government bigger. The supposedly tyrannical Trump has presided over the most dramatic shrinking of federal power since the Reagan administration. Those changes trace back to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). With no help from the left, it succeeded in clear-cutting at least some of the wasteful bureaucracy.
Under Trump, the federal government is becoming more efficient and less prone to waste, fraud, and regulatory overreach. Team Trump has also stripped the feds of some of their more arbitrary powers, like the so-called greenhouse gas endangerment finding that gave the EPA nearly unlimited authority over the composition of our atmosphere.
Hence the hysteria from the big-government left, which is now plotting to reverse Trump’s changes and give power back to the unelected bureaucracy.
Recently, several former Biden administration officials released a report detailing how the DOGE cuts can be rolled back. As one of the authors put it, “We have a lot of rebuilding to do. Our ambition shouldn’t be just limited to gluing the broken pieces of the vase back together.”
The report offers nothing new. Its biggest proposal is yet another cabinet-level department with the Orwellian name Department of Services. It would be charged with “setting government-wide standards for core government functions and then providing the tools, shared platforms, and expertise to help agencies meet them.”
Other cutting-edge ideas include giving federal workers more money and expanding their collective bargaining rights. These are union paybacks that every Democrat administration attempts. Does anyone really believe that this will make government more efficient or effective?
The problem isn’t that government workers are bad people. The problem is that the federal government is a bloated, bureaucratic monopoly. It has no competition and little accountability. Monopolies are intrinsically inefficient. Foolishly adding more layers will only make matters worse.
Like everyone else on the left, the report’s authors claim to be fighting for “democracy,” which is to say fighting President Trump. But one reason Trump is in office today is that the federal government became so unresponsive.
Blue-collar workers in states like West Virginia felt under attack by an EPA that spent more time making their lives miserable than protecting local wildlife. Obamacare and subsequent tinkering by the Department of Health and Human Services only made health insurance far more expensive for most Americans.
Now our friends on the left scream “Affordability!” But it was Joe Biden who spent trillions (which we did not have) on his Inflation Reduction Act (another Orwellian name), which only began to drive huge deficits and prices through the roof.
The Biden administration’s antitrust regulators persecuted American companies, resulting in such triumphs as Spirit Airlines going out of business after the feds blocked its needed merger with JetBlue. The selective enforcement of antitrust laws became a crusade against certain businesses that faced lawsuits and investigations.
Biden’s FTC chair Lina Khan and DOJ antitrust czar Jonathan Kanter casually dispensed with decades of antitrust precedent. They targeted companies based on their size and whether they were on the good guys’ list. It didn’t seem to matter whether targeted companies were actually engaged in anti-competitive activity. It had more to do with their size and how woke they were.
The big-government agenda (and the COVID shutdown) are key factors that have created almost $40 trillion in national debt and laid the foundation for the “affordability crisis.” One important reason Trump was re-elected was that most Americans believed that the big-government lion needed a strong lion tamer.
Washington doesn’t need to have its “workflow adjusted.” It needs to be shrunk down to size and given less power over our lives. That way, average Americans can thrive, not just the unelected bureaucrats and the groups they favor.
One of the federal agencies dismantled by DOGE was called the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS). It was housed in a nine-story office building at the heart of Washington, even though it had only 60 D.C.-based employees, most of whom were working from home.
It was reported that FMCS employees used taxpayer money to order everything from champagne to artwork. One employee admitted that “a lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself.” A reporter who studied the agency said he never managed to figure out what it actually did.
Such a waste of taxpayer money doesn’t play into the Democrats’ narrative about long-suffering civil servants. Sadly, it is all too real and not just at the FMCS.
This is the big-government culture the left wants to bring back to Washington. We the People need to mobilize and make sure they never get the chance.
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