Trump Pulls the Rip Cords on the Administrative State

President Trump is rarely accused of subtlety. Yet, evidence abounds of his ability to find the nuances in situations many of his detractors miss; and, having done so, confounding them by acting to rectify the problem.

Consider the president’s recent executive order offering 2 million federal employees buyouts covering approximately eight months of salary and benefits. Per the New York Post:

The ‘golden age’ of America now comes with a golden parachute… White House aides expect between 5% and 10% of federal workers to take the deal—which is projected to save taxpayers $100 billion a year, according to Axios, which first reported on the plan.

This action by President Trump was imperative. Consider the following trio of recent news items which, can also be viewed as separate informational items, each capable of breeding outrage and/or paranoia depending upon one’s partisan leanings. Yet a deeper understanding of the sinews linking them should instill in all self-respecting Americans, regardless of party, a gnawing, growing sense of the disorder besetting our constitutional republic.

Item: Last month, a RMG Research survey of 500 “federal government managers” (bureaucrats living in and around D.C. who earn at least $75,000 per year) found that 42 percent of them plan to politically oppose the incoming administration; that 64 percent of them who voted for Democrat Kamala Harris for president “would ignore a lawful order from Trump if they considered it to be bad policy”; and just 17 percent of all federal bureaucrats who voted for Harris would obey such an order by Trump.

Item: As President Joe Biden prepared to depart from office, he issued a host of eleventh hour pardons, including of so-called “dedicated, selfless public servants” (like Dr. Anthony Fauci) who worked in the federal bureaucracy and, apparently, required “preemptive” pardons.

Item: Immediately upon returning to office, President Trump issued over 200 executive actions. Involving the use of “omnibus” executive orders, these actions were designed to take “several major steps to assert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy.” [Emphasis mine.]

These items  reveal the fact that the administrative state  displays a deep partisan attachment to the left and seems to believe that it is, a fourth branch of government.

That former President Biden appears to be purblind to the ascendancy of an unconstitutional, unelected, partisan, and unaccountable “fourth branch” of government should surprise no one. Even when he was at his cognitive peak (a low bar, granted), Biden was always a rabid partisan Democrat. The leftist ideology of the administrative state certainly suited him. Given the ongoing scam Democrats perpetrated that Biden had the cognitive capacity to serve as president, all that was really required to ensure Biden’s compliance with the administrative state’s dictates was to allow him the illusion that he controlled it.

To Biden, presiding as a sock-puppet president over such an imperious bureaucracy in his twilight years seemed a boon rather than an embarrassment. Partisan Democrat bureaucrats have molded and implemented the policies spoon-fed to him for his signature. If the administrative state happened to employ these policies as weapons against their political opponents, Biden’s use of preemptive pardons provided the bureaucracy the reassurance needed that its seditious “business as usual” could continue without consequence despite the incoming administration.

Make no mistake, this is not assurance. I use the word reassurance quite deliberately. Consider: How many in the administrative state have ever been held to account for their role in the Russia-gate lie and the implementation of its operation?

Learning by painful experience, President Trump and his incoming administration have acted immediately to rein in the administrative state.

The administrative state and its partisan enablers, in a characteristic fit of projection, will decry this as “political retribution.” But as anyone who has perused that recent RMG Research survey will know, denizens of the administrative state intend to brazenly defy President Trump’s authority (and, no doubt, that of any future president with whom leftist bureaucrats disagree). Consequently, it is not a matter of retribution but of accountability to reassert presidential authority and, ergo, constitutional control over the administrative state.

The administrative state exists as a delegation between two of the three separate and equal branches of the federal government—i.e., from the legislative branch to the executive branch. The federal bureaucracy, in its discretionary or ministerial capacity, exists to implement the policies of the president and/or those that Congress directs the president to execute. Whether such policies are constitutionally permitted is a matter to be determined by the federal judiciary, the third separate, equal branch of the federal government.

In sum, then, the RMG Research survey reaffirms that the administrative state believes itself to be a fourth, separate, and superior branch of the federal government, one possessed of the power to unilaterally and unaccountably determine both the merits, legality, and implementation of public policies. This is an untenable situation, and President Trump is correct to step in and disabuse them of the notion.

The perpetuation—let alone the abetting—of the administrative state as currently constituted would be nothing less than a direct affront to the United States Constitution. If the administrative state is not subdued and subordinated to the consent of the governed and the voters’ duly elected representatives, it will bring us farther away from self-government and nearer to despotism.

Let us hope, then, the affected denizens of the administrative state take the plunge and pull the rip cords on those golden parachutes.

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