Composed mainly of left-leaning actors, its priorities tend to align when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. One exception may have been the Kennedy administration, but that’s a story for another day.

The reverse is generally true when a Republican holds power — especially when that Republican is President Donald Trump. Under Trump, the usual tension between the White House and permanent Washington escalated into open warfare, as the bureaucracy brought its full weight to bear against a commander in chief it regarded as an existential threat.

As hard as it is to imagine, the brash billionaire from New York arrived in Washington with little sense that an administrative state even existed — much less that, by the end of former President Barack Obama’s second term, it had become virtually indistinguishable from the Democratic Party. Worse still, the legacy media, Big Tech, and the most powerful government agencies had closed ranks with a single aim: to bring down Trump, America’s interests be damned.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Improper payments are cheating the taxpayer and bloating the federal budget

Every year, the federal government sends hundreds of billions of dollars to the wrong people —criminals, ineligible recipients, and beneficiaries of bureaucratic errors. In 2024 alone, the federal government admitted to at least $162 billion in improper payments. That’s $1,200 for every household in America.

That’s on top of the $233 billion to $521 billion that the Government Accountability Office estimates the federal government loses annually to fraud.

But even some of these steep price tags are massive understatements.

For example, Medicaid reported $31 billion in improper payments in 2024, but Brian Blase of the Paragon Health Institute and I estimate that the true figure was likely closer to $153 billion (equal to the cost of providing private health insurance to 1.7 million people).

That’s because Medicaid’s reported improper payments metric largely ignores eligibility checks, which are the biggest source of errors.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Clean house to cut waste at the NIH

The Trump administration has bold plans to fix the broken National Institutes of Health and erase Dr. Anthony Fauci’s fingerprints. Entrenched agency bureaucrats are standing in the way. 

In recent interviews defending his proposed cuts to the NIH’s bloated budget, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought singled out wasteful animal tests exposed by White Coat Waste investigations as poster children for the troubled public health agency. 

Vought told Face the Nation, “$2 million for injecting dogs with cocaine … that’s the kind of waste we’ve seen at the NIH. And that’s not even getting to the extent to which the NIH was weaponized against the American people … with regard to funding gain-of-function research that caused the pandemic.” 

As Vought said, “NIH is a program that if they were a company … their stock prices would be in shambles.” 

He’s absolutely right. 

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Department of War’s DOGE efforts don’t reduce expected spending, reallocate funding

The Department of War, like the entire federal government in President Donald Trump’s second term, is trying to find and eliminate wasteful spending, but unlike other agencies, the administration wants to see defense spending increase to unprecedented heights.

One of the signature features of Trump’s first eight months in office has been the establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), originally led by entrepreneur Elon Musk, to root out that waste.

There are currently about a dozen DOGE staffers who are based out of the Pentagon, “dedicated to helping Secretary Hegseth execute on his priorities to make the Department a more efficient steward of taxpayer dollars since the team was established in February,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told the Washington Examiner.

They have identified and eliminated roughly $15 billion of what they believe are wasteful contracts since February, according to a Pentagon official. When this effort began, the department said it wanted to find $50 billion in contracts to eliminate.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

The GAO’s deep state double standard

The deep state does not always hide in the shadows. Sometimes it sits in broad daylight, draped in the language of “accountability” and “oversight,” quietly consolidating power that does not belong to it.

The Government Accountability Office is one of its most effective instruments — a legislative branch agency that has morphed from watchdog to enforcer, using its structural insulation from presidential control to police the executive branch without ever answering to the voters.

What began as a modest auditing service for Congress has become a political weapon. Under the guise of interpreting the Impoundment Control Act, the GAO now issues legal “findings” against the president, treats its own interpretations as binding, and threatens enforcement, despite being led by a comptroller general who can be removed only by Congress. That is not oversight. It is the execution of the law by a legislative officer — a direct violation of the constitutional separation of powers.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

The deep state’s assault on popular sovereignty is finally weakening

The Supreme Court has teed up what could be one of the most important constitutional law cases in 100 years. President Donald Trump removed two members of the Federal Trade Commission in March. One of those commissioners convinced a federal court to block the removal and keep her in office. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to take up the case and on Monday, a majority agreed. 

Formal argument in the case, Trump v. Slaughter, is scheduled for December. The outcome could mean the beginning of the end of the most momentous rebalancing of the separation of powers in generations.

While lawyers and commentators will offer sophisticated arguments on both sides in the coming months, it is important to remind ourselves of the fundamental questions at stake — questions that go back to America’s founding principles. 

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

How red tape made housing the unachievable American dream

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is right. America does have a housing crisis. Stubbornly high construction costs and interest rates have made housing prices across the country unaffordable for many average families. Both homeowners and renters struggle to afford the cost of housing, and the so-called solution of government-regulated affordable housing is exacerbating the problem.  

While government-regulated “affordable housing” projects have been praised by leaders in cities across the nation, in reality, few things capture the dysfunction of government solutions so acutely. 

Instead of providing accessible, affordable options for families in need, affordable housing projects are so heavily regulated that they end up costing significantly more to build when compared to market rate projects.  In just one example in San Jose, California, an “affordable” housing project topped out at nearly a million dollars per unit, an oxymoron to say the least. 

Thanks to layers of red tape, mandates, and regulatory hurdles, what was meant to be a lifeline has become so complicated that it takes specialized accountants, lawyers, consultants, developers, general contractors, and property managers to complete the paperwork to build and operate the building. From zoning restrictions to environmental reviews that can take years, the cost of navigating the regulations makes new housing impossible to deliver at a reasonable cost. Add in labor mandates that stifle competition and local regulations to compete with federal ones, and you have the perfect recipe for sky-high prices, endless delays, and fewer homes for the people who need them most. With already tight federal and state budgets, the significant per-unit costs for affordable housing mean families continue to struggle to afford the housing they were promised.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Stop the exploitation of student data for politics

Dropping off a teenager at college for the first time is a momentous occasion in a parent’s life. Will they thrive? Will they keep up with the academic rigor, the new expectations, the navigation of social dynamics, a new pattern of life, and the transition to adulthood over the coming years?

These questions weigh on the minds of many college students’ parents. But, as if they aren’t enough to worry about, the federal government has quietly allowed the exploitation of these students‘ personal information. This practice by the Department of Education only serves to make parents more worried.

For over a decade, under a very questionable interpretation of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Education Department has allowed sensitive student data to be collected from schools and delivered to outside organizations. These organizations, in turn, funnel this data to partisan operatives targeting college students for voter registration and voter turnout.

How is this legal?

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Follow Rick Crawford’s plan to fix counterintelligence

Counterintelligence is a hush-hush business that’s seldom discussed publicly, but there are few lines of work more vital to our national security. Blunting foreign espionage, the rampant theft of America’s defense and trade secrets, above all, represents an urgent mission for our intelligence community.

Bipartisan warnings about the outmoded state of U.S. counterintelligence have mounted in recent years, amid the biggest upsurge in foreign espionage against our country in history. Communist China represents by far the biggest espionage threat we face, dwarfing even the robust Soviet spy threat during the Cold War, but the number of countries adept at stealing our secrets runs into the dozens.

Unfortunately, the second Trump administration appears to be asleep at the wheel regarding the foreign espionage threat to our peace and prosperity.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

It’s time to finish the dismantling of the Education Department

The Department of Education has operated as a costly experiment in federal overreach for too long —expanding bureaucratic layers, weakening local control, and spending billions without improving academic outcomes. 

The department was intended to ensure access to equal educational opportunity for all students, supplement educational efforts at the state level, and serve as a research organization to provide guidance and best practices to policymakers. Instead, it has created red tape, enforced radical ideologies through one-size-fits-all mandates, and drained critical resources from classrooms with bloated administrative processes and procedures. 

It’s time for Education Secretary Linda McMahon to finish the job and dismantle what’s left of the U.S. Department of Education.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Ending DEI programs means Americans win and bureaucracy loses

Diversity, equity, inclusion. These three words, commonly referred to as DEI, sound harmless, even virtuous. We all want everyone to be treated fairly. Unfortunately, DEI has become a shield for expensive, unfair, and often unlawful discrimination in federal hiring practices. 

DEI advocates often liken these policies to Title VI and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but that comparison is misleading. Title VI prohibits discrimination in federally funded programs on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Title VII does the same in employment for race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These landmark laws were clear, direct, and neutral: Judge merit, prohibit discrimination, and keep identity politics out of programs and employment.

Nearly 60 years later, however, lawmakers and bureaucrats decided the existing protections weren’t enough. Under the banner of DEI, the definition of “discrimination” was twisted beyond recognition. Instead of protecting individuals from unequal treatment, DEI became a justification for imposing new mandates, expanding bureaucracy, and pouring billions of dollars into programs that often achieve little besides growing government payrolls.

In January 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” This order effectively injected DEI with steroids across the federal bureaucracy. The order required every federal agency to submit a plan to “increase diversity” within its ranks. The reports that followed were filled with lofty rhetoric and bureaucratic jargon — using the word “underserved” nearly 90 times in an effort to legitimize massive spending. By lumping virtually every program under the umbrella of “equity,” the administration blurred the lines between real civil rights protections and unchecked federal spending sprees.

The result was shocking.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

DOGE struggles without Elon Musk at the helm

With Tesla CEO Elon Musk no longer in charge, the Department of Government Efficiency’s aggressive actions to slash the federal workforce and wasteful spending have fallen into the background of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Musk left DOGE in late May after a chaotic tenure that featured multiple lawsuits, literal clashes between some agency workers and law enforcement, tensions among Cabinet members, and questions about whether billions of dollars of fraud had actually been slashed.

Katie Miller, a senior aide for Musk’s work with DOGE, also exited and now hosts a podcast geared toward conservative women. Eight other core DOGE staffers left at the same time as Musk, too. Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old DOGE staffer widely known as “Big Balls,” was physically attacked by a group of juveniles in Washington near Dupont Circle in early August. Cortistine is now with the Social Security Administration.

In May, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan also refused to dismiss a lawsuit from 14 Democratic state attorneys general alleging Musk and DOGE’s efforts were illegal. Chutkan did, however, remove Trump from the lawsuit.

A spokesperson with the Office of Management and Budget told the Washington Examiner that DOGE continues to root out government waste daily. DOGE’s website claims it has saved roughly $206 billion— far below Musk’s original goal of $2 trillion in savings.

But the organization’s effectiveness remains mixed.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Rooting out the deep state in American agriculture

In July, Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans for the reorganization of the Agriculture Department and the relocation of over 40% of its Washington-based workforce to five distributed hubs across America — closer to home for our farmers.

Federal agency reorganizations are fairly standard in Washington following changes in presidential administrations, but the last part of Rollins’s announcement really got the swamp howling. Namely, the plan to reduce the Washington-based USDA staff presence from 4,600 to 2,000 and to send functions to the hinterlands was an affront to the managerial class.

As a veteran of five different federal and state government agencies (Matt), the outcry came as no surprise. What did, however, was the boldness of the proposal and Rollins’s willingness to enact what political scientists have discussed for decades, namely, working to reconcile bureaucratic governance and democratic theory.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Washington’s bureaucrats are sinking the states

Like an iceberg, the federal administrative state is a massive force with most of its power hidden beneath the surface — and its impact on the states is deeper than most Americans realize.

Since the 1970s, the administrative state has grown significantly, with the addition of agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Department of Energy. Over the decades, Congress has delegated much of its authority to these agencies.

As states face a growing federal administrative state, they have simultaneously increased their dependency on federal dollars. The latest data indicate that the average state receives 37% of its revenue from Washington, D.C. These dollars and the strings they often come with affect how states budget and govern.

But Washington’s overreach doesn’t stop with funding strings. It also imposes its will through “guidance” — a form of agency communication that provides directions to individuals, companies, and state and local governments seeking to comply with federal law. While most guidance is intended to be clarifying, it does not carry the force of law, even though some bureaucrats would love for states to believe it does. In fact, states are not required to adopt the recommendations from federally issued guidance. Unfortunately, some federal agencies prey on a state’s lack of awareness and occasionally use guidance to circumvent the rulemaking process, imposing directives on the states.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Move AFRICOM to Africa

President Donald Trump cares little for bureaucratic norms and refuses to allow legacy inefficiencies to straitjacket him. While he signals little interest in Africa, the rise of Chinese and Russian influence on the continent and the concurrent hemorrhaging of French and U.S. influence pose a challenge to U.S. strategic interests on the continent.

Neither the White House nor the American public wishes to involve the United States in African conflicts, but presence and partnerships matter. Reticence about involvement does not prevent conflict; that was the lesson of Great Britain’s post-World War I “Ten Year Rule” that hobbled the British military in the run-up to World War II.  

Trump may have reverted the Defense Department to the Department of War, but the day-to-day job of the military is to prevent war. Deterrence, after all, is not just a rhetorical strategy but a military one. U.S. advisers help local African partners upgrade their capabilities so terrorists do not fill power vacuums. U.S. drones flying over huge swaths of territory deny space to weapons smugglers and terrorists. U.S. forces are some of the region’s best diplomats as well, inoculating farm animals, responding to humanitarian disasters, and evacuating Americans in need.

The Pentagon divides its international operations into combatant commands. The Hawaii-based U.S. Indo-Pacific Command coordinates military operations from Mongolia and China to Australia and New Zealand, and from India to Antarctica. U.S. Central Command covers the Middle East and northern Africa. While headquartered in Tampa, Florida, it maintains a forward headquarters in Qatar. U.S. Southern Command, covering Latin America and the Caribbean, is based in Doral, Florida. U.S. European Command is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, as well as U.S. Africa Command.

Africa is a huge continent. It is home to 54 United Nations-recognized countries, which will be more if Somaliland and Biafra get their wish. Yet, not only is AFRICOM based in Europe rather than Africa, but it also has headquarters in a city that has no direct flights to Africa, requiring travelers to make connections and take trains at additional expense and time.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

The Left’s real power is controlling the bureaucracy

Which is more important: winning elections or controlling institutions? Achieving the former doesn’t guarantee the latter.

Since the New Deal, Republicans have won the presidency 11 times, occupying the White House for nearly half the time since World War II. Yet public policy has steadily shifted leftward, with expanding welfare programs, economic and environmental regulations, increased government intervention in the economy, and the rise of federally sanctioned DEI initiatives. It often feels like the Left has maintained control regardless of who holds office.

This is largely due to the administrative state — America’s de facto permanent government — which consistently leans left.

The progressive push for an expansive administrative state has deep roots. Ever since Woodrow Wilson wrote his influential 1887 essay, “The Study of Administration,” the Left has regarded an enlarged administrative state as necessary in order to govern a complex modern society, requiring a new kind of expertise.

To progressives, an expanded administrative state is not just necessary for governing a complex modern society. It’s a means of achieving through bureaucratic fiat what they could never hope to achieve via the ballot box. 

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

The Defense Department’s budget is still not transparent

Amid the Defense Department leadership’s emphasis on speed, efficiency, and the warrior ethos, and the White House Office of Management and Budget‘s creative financing to claim a $1 trillion defense budget in 2026, the true cost of our security remains unclear.  

If the defense budget was actually $1 trillion as touted and if all those resources were going toward its core function — deterring and, if necessary, fighting and winning America’s wars — that would be an accomplishment worthy of recognition and pride. Such fiscal commitment would acknowledge providing for the common defense as the only constitutionally directed mandatory and exclusive job of the federal government. It would also set spending on a trajectory toward sufficiency in a world where the threats facing the United States are greater than at any time since 1945. 

Unfortunately, the defense budget is not $1 trillion, and it misses the mark in providing transparency about the costs of our security. Whether there is another yearlong continuing resolution that just extends current funding into the next year, which seems increasingly likely, or an actual appropriation, the true number for Pentagon spending in 2026 will likely fall well short of $1 trillion. Yet that still is not the full story.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Experience, not diversity, should drive State Department hiring

I was excited to take the Foreign Service Exam a bit over a quarter century ago. I had always been a foreign policy nerd; I had memorized the flags of every country in the world in kindergarten and would reproduce them with crayons at the art table.

I entered college as a molecular biophysics major, but got sidetracked by the smorgasbord of history classes on offer: My freshmen year I took Middle Eastern history and delved into Southeast Asia. Later it was Japan and Russia, Chinese history, Sir Michael Howard’s military history, Paul Kennedy’s diplomatic history, and Robin Winks’ history of intelligence.  The Foreign Service Exam was fun: It was like Trivial Pursuit, but not much more substantive. The oral exam was also predictable: Take charge and delegate but don’t dominate; keep your notes artificially clear since proctors will collect and assess them. The subjectiveness of the oral exam and group exercises allows the State Department to fulfill its diversity quotas. The State Department long argued that “to advance national security,” it must build “a more diverse, equitable, inclusive, and accessible State Department.”

I was 27 years old and weeks away from my Ph.D. when I got the offer to join the Foreign Service and be a U.S. diplomat. I turned it down. I am grateful I did.

I may have had the academic credentials, but I had spent nearly my entire life in school. I had minor jobs on the side here and there, but no real job. I had never supported myself beyond receiving scholarships or teaching stipends, and I had never had to manage a household or manage a payroll. I now only realize decades later how limited my experience was, and I realize that for the country, I made the right decision.

Simply put, if the State Department wants the best Foreign Service Officers, it should prioritize experience over superficial categories of diversity.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Making America’s diplomats work better

It is an open secret within the State Department that diplomats cable reports, memorandums of conversation, and other memos but that the audience for most of these is only a small handful of diplomats working related subjects back home. Diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, for example, might write several cables each week, but they would be lucky if anyone other than the Mongolia desk officer at the State Department read them.

Essentially, diplomats are like hamsters in a wheel, constantly working but advancing nothing. It is not just a make-work function for the author, but it sucks up time up the chain as higher-ups need to edit and clear the cables that perhaps only a dozen people will ever read.

Nor is the content necessary worth the time. Reports of a conversation with a deputy minister or lunch with a political party representative seldom advance understanding significantly for two reasons. First, there is often as much distance between elites in Third World countries and their citizens as there is between American diplomats behind embassy walls.

Essentially, the conversations diplomats have in their host countries are elites talking to elites about what the masses might think, with few, if anyone, involved in the conversation actually knowing the elite. True, it is often the elites who make decisions, but information has evolved in the past century. Washington receives information from newspapers, television, and radio. Diplomatic conversations are an archaic artifact of the past.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

FOIA follies: How the deep state avoids transparency

The deep state isn’t nearly as deep as it would like you to think, nor is it as clever as it thinks — these are, after all, bureaucrats. Many may be partisans intent on quietly thwarting one party’s agenda while greasing the skids for the other, but they’re also the types who ask why you didn’t put the cover sheet on your TPS report.

What the deep state does well is to use the bureaucracy’s failings and inefficiencies to cover its tracks. Transparency and accountability can get lost in clerical processes. Ambiguous official terminology can muck up or even prematurely end straightforward information searches. 

That is how some agencies subvert the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA was passed by Congress in the 1960s and amended several times since, to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society, needed to check against corruption and to hold the governors accountable to the governed.”

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

A strong start toward downsizing the Department of Education

This spring, Education Secretary Linda McMahon slashed staff at the Department of Education, laying off 1,400 employees to shrink the agency to just over 2,000 — about half its former size. The reductions vastly exceeded what most had expected and shattered the department’s comfortable lethargy.

The savings aren’t enormous (probably totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million a year in salary, benefits, and facility costs), but they’re real and a terrific prelude to downshifting and course-correcting Washington, D.C.,’s role in education. But it will take much more to see the job through: namely, publicizing the problems, delivering on promises, and taking a hatchet to the accumulated red tape.

Now, some readers may say, “Hold on! Isn’t Trump going to abolish the department? What more is needed?” Well, the odds are that a smaller department will still be with us, in some form, in 2029. And even if it’s not, congressionally mandated education funds will continue to flow to K–12 and higher education. The bottom line: Whatever the department’s ultimate fate, it’s important to finish what McMahon started. There are a few steps that department leadership should take.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

The fifth branch of government needs to go

The Constitution created three branches of government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. For the past century, progressives in Congress have created a fourth branch composed of “independent agencies” and an unaccountable regulatory bureaucracy. This fourth branch is now often called the administrative state.

But Congress has also created a fifth branch of government that few people know about.

This fifth branch is composed of so-called self-regulatory organizations. They are private organizations to which Congress has delegated regulatory and taxing power. They are largely opaque and unaccountable — an administrative state inside the administrative state. None of the due process, transparency, regulatory, or other protections we normally associate with government apply to their actions.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Richard Nixon enabled the administrative state

Many on the Right are offering revisionist praise of President Richard Nixon, celebrating his broadsides against the New Left and his strong cultural conservative instincts.

He called institutions such as the press, political establishment, and academia the enemy of the people. Yet the revisionism from some conservative commentators glosses over the Nixon who expanded the administrative state and further weaponized Washington agencies against Americans.

But for all his talk of conservative principles, Nixon imposed wage and price controls and created a host of new federal agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. While in some ways he was an early culture warrior, Nixon expanded federal power that undercut the very conservatism he claimed to defend.

By empowering the administrative state and federal agencies, Nixon entrenched a system that eroded congressional authority and left vast swaths of policymaking in the hands of bureaucrats unaccountable to voters.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

The hidden flow of federal guidance to Wisconsin state agencies

Since 2011, Wisconsin has served as a model for states interested in enacting regulatory reforms. Throughout the administration of Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), Wisconsin conservatives enacted some of the boldest reforms in the nation, all geared to protecting the prerogatives of Wisconsin legislators to actually set policy for the state, as opposed to relying on unelected bureaucrats, as well as preventing the federal government from exerting undue influence over state policy.  

The overall success of Wisconsin’s administrative reform revolution was reflected in the State Policy Network’s Center for Practical Federalism Scorecard, where Wisconsin leapfrogged Utah in 2024, ranking as the state least likely to be impacted by federal pressure. 

However, federal guidance documents flowed into states such as Wisconsin during the Biden administration, often unbeknownst to state lawmakers. Even in the current environment, prioritizing the detection and review of federal guidance will ensure federal influence over states is dragged out of the shadows into the sunlight of legislative oversight.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Big government created a drug monopoly. Trump and Congress can fix it

Why do Americans pay so much at the pharmacy counter? 

One often overlooked factor is that established pharmaceutical companies have been working with big government to short-circuit the free market and make it impossible for generic medicines to compete. It’s time for President Donald Trump and Congress to take on this unholy alliance and bring down healthcare costs for all Americans.

The problem begins, as it so often does, with the federal bureaucracy. 

Only 10% of pharmaceuticals make it through the Food and Drug Administration’s gauntlet of red tape. This biases the system towards established drug companies. By roadblocking new competition, the FDA helps them maintain monopolies and drives up prices.

Another piece of the puzzle is how federal law enables drug companies to manipulate patents — which are time-limited, government-granted monopolies — for their own crony interests. 

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

A second reconciliation bill should focus on reducing deficits

Republicans on Capitol Hill are starting to debate a second budget bill, following the One Big Beautiful Bill signed into law by Trump on the Fourth of July. That law extends and expands the first Trump tax cuts, which overall increase already large deficits projected ahead. Meanwhile, news accounts suggest Republicans are having trouble agreeing on “a grand, unifying goal” for a second bill.

One focus should be obvious: reducing growing deficits by cutting federal spending that remains significantly above pre-pandemic levels.

That’s naturally easier said than done, for various reasons. Many of the biggest spending drivers are beyond the reach of budget legislation. And finding common ground on available spending cuts is always harder than increasing deficits through popular tax cuts or spending hikes. In fact, legislation that increases the deficit is one of the few things both parties agree on. Meanwhile, Republicans are already getting hammered for OBBB savings policies that haven’t even taken effect yet.

A second budget bill is a good time to turn that around by starting to bring deficits down. To do so, lawmakers should follow three principles: set a firm goal of cutting deficits, repeat what works, and avoid future budget-busting spending.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Accountability

Yes, Trump can fire bureaucrats who block his agenda

A major legal and political battle is unfolding that will decide if Trump has the power to fire key officials whom he believes are obstructing his agenda.

Trump is facing a lawsuit brought by Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat who was appointed by President Joe Biden to the Federal Trade Commission. She argues that Trump does not have the right to remove her. 

The case, Slaughter v. Trump, is quickly becoming a high-stakes constitutional showdown over whether the president of the U.S. has the authority to fire confirmed presidential nominees. 

At the heart of the dispute is a nearly century-old Supreme Court ruling called Humphrey’s Executor. That case originally protected so-called “independent” agencies such as the FTC from presidential control, limiting the president’s power to remove their leaders. 

The flaw in her case is that these agencies have changed a lot since 1935.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

The president can remove the Fed chairman

For over a century, the Federal Reserve has wielded immense influence over America’s economy, shaping interest rates, credit, and financial stability. Yet its most powerful official, the chairman, operates under a veil of “independence” that too often shields mismanagement from accountability. That is neither what the Constitution envisioned nor what people deserve.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s tenure illustrates why this shield should be reexamined. From sluggish responses to inflation, earning him the label “Too Late Jerome Powell,” to overseeing record multibillion-dollar operating losses, Powell’s leadership failures are not abstract. They have real consequences for U.S. households and businesses. To make matters worse, he has presided over a $2.5 billion headquarters renovation marred by cost overruns, luxury upgrades, and misrepresentations to Congress.

Article II vests “the executive Power” solely in the president, who must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” In Myers v. United States, the Supreme Court held that this power includes removing those who act on the president’s behalf. Without removal authority, the president cannot be held politically accountable for the execution of federal law — the very outcome Alexander Hamilton warned against in Federalist No. 70.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Fixing the administrative state starts with curtailing guidance memos

President Donald Trump came into his second term laser-focused on dismantling the administrative state. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: unless we confront its favorite weapon — federal agency guidance — we are only swinging at shadows.

Guidance — whether memos, bulletins, “Dear Colleague” letters, FAQs, or even blog posts — never goes through public notice-and-comment, rarely appears in the Federal Register, and is often used to push politicized policies.

Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute calls it “regulatory dark matter”: everywhere, shaping everything, and largely invisible. During Trump’s first term, an executive order forced agencies to reveal more than 100,000 guidance documents, proof of just how vast the corpus is. President Joe Biden later rescinded the order, and the regulatory dark matter crept back.

Big-government apologists insist guidance is harmless — just agencies “explaining” the law. Practitioners know better. States, schools, and businesses ignore “nonbinding” guidance at their peril. A memo waved by a federal bureaucrat can turn a suggestion into a standard, a “pilot” into a mandate, and a preference into a prerequisite for keeping funds flowing or avoiding scrutiny. This is how policy spreads without votes, transparency, or accountability.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

The UN needs reform. Trump can force it on them

President Donald Trump has taken unprecedented steps in reevaluating America’s relationship with the United Nations. He has withdrawn from several organizations, launched a comprehensive review of United States membership in all international organizations and multilateral treaties, and sharply curtailed U.S. funding to these organizations. These actions have caused great apprehension within the affected organizations and among other governments, who worry about the effect on international programs and initiatives that they deem valuable.

But there is a significant upside for which Americans, other nations, and even the U.N. should be grateful. This fiscal crisis has forced U.N. organizations to confront the bloat, mission creep, and inefficiencies that have infected them over decades. If the result of this process is a leaner, more effective United Nations, then both the donor nations that support the U.N. system and the many people who depend on its programs will benefit.

The United Nations and its affiliated organizations can do good work and support U.S. interests, but they depend disproportionately on the U.S. taxpayer to fund their activities. For instance, in 2023, the U.S. was responsible for nearly 28% of all government contributions to the U.N. system. For the U.N. regular and peacekeeping budgets, the U.S. is charged 22% and 26.1584%, which is more than the amount that 184 nations are charged for those two budgets combined.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

The bureaucracy enabled debanking. Now it can stop it

Banks are legally prohibited from discriminating in lending based on race and gender. But what stops them or their regulators from making politically biased decisions to drop an individual, family, or company in the name of reducing “reputational” risk? 

As it turns out, the answer is not much. Welcome to the world of debanking. 

Over the past several years, we have seen a growing trend of federal regulators taking advantage of vague and overly broad regulations to advance an agenda, rooting their regulatory guidance in political ideological motivations instead of quantitative financial terms. When banks operationalize this guidance, rightly unwilling to risk the steep penalties that come with a lack of compliance, the perfect conditions are created for those on the “wrong” side of the aisle to find themselves wrongly classified as a “reputational risk” and suddenly unable to access financial services — debanked. 

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

It’s time to REIN in DC

The old adage that politics makes strange bedfellows could prove true once again. On the surface, Republicans and Democrats seem as divided as ever, locked in battles that dominate headlines. But if you look past the slogans to places such as Raleigh, Baton Rouge, and Oklahoma City, you’ll find something different: a trend quietly taking shape in state capitals. And more importantly, you’ll see a solution that both sides of the aisle could agree on — or at the very least — one they should.

Consider two major concerns driving today’s political fights in Washington. On the one hand, you have Republicans clamoring against the administrative state, highlighting how entrenched bureaucrats are shaping public policy free from any direct accountability from voters. Democrats, meanwhile, are raising alarms about authoritarianism, hosting ‘No Kings’ protests to demand democracy and accountability. Both sides are, in their own way, sounding the alarm about unchecked power.

What if there were a way to decrease centralized power and place major decision-making power back in the hands of democratically elected officials that are directly accountable to the American people?

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

AI can help fix America’s quasi-deep state

In the United States there is no “Deep State” in the sense that the term was originally used. The concept of a deep state came from secret authoritarian networks that operated inside the Turkish government during the 1990’s. The deep state networks involved the military, the intelligence services, the police and organized crime.

Instead, in the U.S. there is a quasi deep state made up of powerful special interest groups that exercise excess influence over the bureaucracy of the federal government. These groups operate in plain view. Such special interest organizations damage the nation, especially regarding national security. They also create economic and social friction at home which reduces both economic growth and trust in government. 

Perhaps the most obvious and damaging example of the quasi-deep state was the intelligence failure regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The intelligence services told then-President George W. Bush what he wanted to hear. The intelligence bureaucracy failed the nation. More recently, in 2016, then Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, repeatedly interfered in the presidential election and caused many Americans to distrust the electoral process and the federal government more generally. Then CIA Director John Brennan did much the same. The nation continues to pay the price for these clear derelictions of duty. 

Across government, then, the federal bureaucracy must be reformed in order to enhance national security and to provide greater transparency and certainty on administrative matters regarding domestic policy, including economic activity. Transparency and certainty will contribute to stronger economic growth. When the nation’s economy is strong, more resources are available for national defense.

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National Academy of Sciences’s fast-track climate review is a political end-run 

The central pillar of the “Green New scam” is the claim, no qualifications allowed, that carbon dioxide emissions are harmful. But, of course, a few hundredths of a percent of extra CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t harmful to humans at the individual level. So, activists insist it hurts people indirectly, saying it will create an unlivable world decades or centuries from now, despite having no factual proof to back up their claims.

They’ve cemented this idea not because the science is damning (it isn’t) but by capturing a chain of intermediaries, from major media to well-funded nonprofit organizations, that stand between the research and the public, translating unalarming findings into sweeping political decrees.

The Department of Energy is trying to restore context to decades of one-way alarmism. Many people don’t know, for example, that multiple large studies found cold kills 5-15 times more people than heat, and climate disaster deaths have declined by roughly 98% over the last century as societies became more resilient. And almost no climate debate acknowledges that CO2-emitting machines power the life-saving infrastructure of modernity: storm warnings, refrigeration, hospitals, and vehicles.

Whether readers agree with the conclusions of the Energy Department’s report or not, the department has taken a step that should earn public trust: it posted the draft, identified the authors, and opened a formal Federal Register docket for comments from any critic willing to engage on the record. That’s what scientific due process looks like in a republic. 

The National Academy of Sciences chose the opposite model.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Congress must curtail the secret lawmaking of the administrative state

The rule of law is impossible if federal administrative agencies make secret, informal laws with little to no oversight from elected lawmakers. And yet, this is exactly what has been happening in the U.S. for many years. It’s time for Congress to rein in this practice and restore the principle of separation of powers to our constitutional order.

In the Schoolhouse Rock song “I’m Just a Bill,” an idea to increase traffic safety by making school buses stop at railroad crossings is proposed as legislation in Congress and approved in committee before it receives a favorable vote in the House and Senate, survives a possible veto, and becomes a law.

But there is a darker sequel to this story in which federal administrative agencies provide state and local governments additional information about how exactly they can comply with the law. Though this is common, it is constitutionally dubious at best, particularly since Congress is enacting fewer laws and the executive branch is filling the void.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Fix the CIA by getting rid of the Directorate of Analysis

The Central Intelligence Agency is America’s most famous spy outfit. It’s not our biggest or best-funded intelligence service — that’s the National Security Agency — but the CIA’s reputation was long ago established in the popular imagination, between spy movies and novels. When people think about espionage, the CIA is what comes to mind.

The agency is an experienced bureaucratic player inside the Beltway. It protects its turf with more effectiveness than the agency sometimes displays with its spy mission. However, the hour for serious reform has arrived. During former President Barack Obama’s second term, his relationship with the CIA turned toxic, thanks to his excessively cozy relationship with Director John Brennan, a naked Democratic partisan. Matters hardly improved under former President Joe Biden, when CIA leadership and too much of the intelligence community corrupted themselves by endorsing White House lies about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the attacks on U.S. intelligence personnel known as the Havana Syndrome.

We need a fresh start in the second Trump administration, yet so far results are mixed. CIA Director John Ratcliffe enjoys a good relationship with the White House. The administration’s emphasis on payback against the deep state for its past sins against Trump is a top priority for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, but Ratcliffe has played along too. Gabbard’s reaching into CIA ranks to purge suspected anti-Trumpers, especially when the anti-Trump evidence against some of those officers is very thin, doesn’t sit well with many Langley veterans.

The larger problem, which Team Trump must address, is that the CIA shouldn’t have the political power it possesses, much of which is derived from its status as the U.S. government’s chief intelligence analyst.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Declare antifa a foreign terrorist organization

The assassination of Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10 upended American politics. The public killing of the country’s most prominent young conservative activist was a game-changing event for the country, the effects of which will reverberate for years.

Trump and his administration have promised to confront the left-wing ideology and infrastructure that motivated Kirk’s suspected killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. Contrary to liberal deflection, it’s evident that Robinson rejected the religious conservatism of his upbringing, embracing radical leftism. His beliefs, nurtured online, appear to be a witch’s brew of neocommunism, transgender activism (including fringe fetishes), and gun rights, which led Robinson to allegedly kill Kirk, whom he hated for his critiques of the transgender movement.

Antifa Inc: How an ideology became an organized criminal network

Much of this ideology falls under the rubric of antifa (for “anti-fascism”), a loose anticapitalist movement possessing cells across the West that agitates for “Woke Bolshevism,” while its increasing amalgamation with extremist LGBT activists can be termed “Trantifa.” The White House has already promised to ban antifa as a terrorist organization, with the president castigating it as a “terrorist group.”

Executing a ban presents legal challenges. Although the government has banned certain foreign terrorist organizations since 1997, including al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah, the challenge is that, as the name implies, foreign terrorist organizations must be foreign. At present, there exists no mechanism to ban domestic groups that embrace violence to further their political aims.

But what if antifa is a foreign terrorist organization?

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Linda McMahon shows how to take on the deep state

The deep state has been described as the “secretive illuminati of bureaucrats determined to sabotage the Trump agenda.” But in education, this illuminati doesn’t just threaten a political agenda: It threatens the success of millions of students in school and in life.

Can Secretary Linda McMahon upend the Education Department’s bureaucratic deep state? She’s already doing it.

Last month, McMahon launched a 50-state tour, not to tout the successes of the new White House but to talk with teachers and parents about returning education authority to state and local educators. Education is a state priority, embedded in the constitutions of each of our nation’s laboratories of democracy, and McMahon is right to hit the road to meet with state education officials.

Critics seek an explanation for how limiting the federal footprint in education would help students. They want examples of the ways McMahon can downsize Washington’s role in education. She has answers.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

Humphrey’s Executor case shouldn’t survive the Trump presidency

If the Supreme Court wants to correct one of the worst decisions of the progressive era, one that violated basic separation of powers principles and vitiated the constitutional authority of the president as head of the executive branch, it will finally overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. after 90 years of poisoning the government well.

If you’ve never heard of the case, don’t be embarrassed. Most people, aside from government wonks and constitutional nerds, haven’t. However, it’s finally being brought to the fore because of Trump’s firing of government officials at so-called independent agencies, and it’s about time.

The Supreme Court just issued a temporary stay of lower court orders in Trump v. Slaughter that told Trump he couldn’t fire Rebecca Slaughter, a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. This followed other recent cases in which the justices stayed lower court decisions banning Trump from firing officials such as Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris from the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, respectively.

All of these government officials sued, claiming Trump lacked the authority to fire them. They relied on Humphrey’s Executor, which appears to be on life support. So, what was that case all about and why is it still important today?

Read more from the Washington Examiner.

West Point is a case study in the bureaucracy’s unaccountability

West Point remains an institution seemingly immune to Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth‘s vision for a military dedicated to lethality and immune to the ideological temptation to play politics with the U.S. Army.

From the stubborn employment of professors who facilitate absurd, leftist academic endeavors to the brazen appointments of censorship regime Biden officials, West Point has become a warning of how critical elements of the federal bureaucracy can become immune to accountability and political control, an urgent crisis worthy of serious reform.

While Hegseth ordered broad and complete reforms that should have fundamentally altered how West Point conducts affairs, compliance has been at worst illusory and at best delayed. West Point leaders met orders to dismantle the diversity, equity, and inclusion complex with brash censorship and a cudgel of policies that ostracized academic freedom without meaningfully dismantling the DEI bureaucracy.

Read more from the Washington Examiner.