What Is The Administrative State?

Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

Last week in this virtual space, I wrote that Donald Trump would make a renewed effort during his second term to dismantle “the administrative state.” As in his first term, he would employ various strategies to blunt the effects of the administrative apparatus that governs us. He would, for example, disperse some parts of the government outside the overwhelmingly left-progressive swamp of Washington, D.C.

As an aside, I should note that I regard the persistence of Washington as the seat of our government as a serious impediment to the goal of “deconstructing” the administrative state. “It has,” I wrote back in 2022, “long been obvious to candid observers that there is something deeply dysfunctional about that overwhelmingly Democratic, welfare-addicted city.”

It is a partisan sinkhole. Jefferson wanted the capital moved from New York to Washington in part to bring it closer to the South, but also to place it in a locality that was officially neutral. There is nothing neutral about Washington today. The city has some impressive architecture and urban vistas. They should be preserved and staffed as tourist attractions. But the reins of power should be relocated.

I doubt that will happen. Which means that the eternal vigilance that MAGA must maintain around its enemies will have to be redoubled. Trump attempting to govern from Washington will be like Ike trying to undertake the Normandy invasion with half his planners on loan from the German general staff.

Still, there are some symbolic gestures that he and his aides might consider. I have long suggested that the inauguration be held somewhere other than Washington, D.C. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires the inauguration be in Washington. LBJ, remember, was sworn in on Air Force One just a couple of hours after Kennedy was assassinated. When Warren Harding died, Calvin Coolidge was visiting the family homestead in Vermont. His father, a justice of the peace, administered the oath of office in the parlor. I think the next inauguration should be well away from the swamp of Washington. Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach is one venue that springs to mind, but I am sure there are other attractive spots. At a minimum, I hope the inauguration committee will consider having some of the parties elsewhere. A ball in Butler, PA, for example, would not only be celebratory but also serve as a useful reminder of how close Trump came to a fatal encounter with an assassin’s bullet.

But the trouble with “Washington”—I use scare quotes to indicate that we are dealing with spiritual as well as geographical dispensation—is not only its partisan nature. There is also its apparently unstoppably expansionist character. No matter which party is in power, the business of Washington is to make government bigger—forever. Republicans talk about “limited government.” They then sign on to nearly every scheme to make government bigger and more intrusive. Democrats do the same, of course, but they generally skip the rhetorical foreplay about making government smaller.

One huge difference this time around will be the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE for short, an ad hoc executive initiative that will be overseen by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They outlined their bold plan in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal last week. “Unlike government commissions or advisory committees,” they noted, “we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs.” Will they? It would be pretty to think so. Musk has said that he wants to cut government expenditures by $2 trillion. If he could manage even a quarter of that amount, it would be something to write home about. It may seem utopian. But remember, Musk bought Twitter and instantly cut the workforce by 80 percent. He vastly improved the platform, salvaged free speech, and transformed a dying company into a dynamic one.

As usual, the devil will be in the details. Musk and Ramaswamy may identify the ideal candidates for downsizing or elimination. Exactly how will they move from pen to scissors is the $64,000—or rather, the $2 trillion—question. I take solace from the thought that if anyone can do it, the triumvirate of Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy can. Naturally, opposition will be ferocious. Will it also be effective? Time will tell.

I have not yet answered the question posed in my title: “What is the administrative state?” A friend asked me that in the course of our conversation about my column last week. Isn’t it possible, he asked, that “administrative state,” like its scarier sounding cousin, “deep state” is just a polysyllabic synonym for “state,” for the complex activities of government in a complex, technologically advanced polity? Maybe “administrative state” is just an invention of right-wing “conspiracy theorists” who find goblins where there are only harmless bureaucrats?

I nattered on about the growth of the regulatory state, the battalions of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who govern us from their perches in the alphabet soup of modern, Kafkaesque governance, and put in a plug for Tocqueville’s analysis of “democratic despotism.” I also noted that the phrase “conspiracy theorist” is generally used in a prophylactic, not a descriptive sense. That is, it is a phrase that is wheeled out when the aim is to end, not further, the conversation. The problem is not conspiracy theories, but conspiracies in fact.

One example.  When revelation of the contents of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” threatened to upend Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, Anthony Blinken asked acting CIA director Michael Morell to organize a letter signed by 51 former intelligence officers stating that the laptop bore all the signs of “Russian disinformation.” Morell did this, he said,  in order to give Biden a “talking point” for his forthcoming debate with Donald Trump. The public did not know this at the time. When the truth leaked out, the establishment claimed it was only a “conspiracy theory” put about by Trump supporters. But it wasn’t a conspiracy theory. It was a conspiracy in fact. 

I stand by everything I said, but I did not say enough, and what I did say was not precise enough. Formulating definitions is often a mug’s game. This is because, for any important matter, a definition that is true will also have to be so general as to be vacuous or at least unilluminating. What is love? What is virtue? What is knowledge? In everyday life, these chestnuts from the philosophy seminar tend to get assimilated to the indefinite definition Justice Potter Stewart offered for “obscenity”: “I know it when I see it.”

Still, there’s something to be said for making the effort. So here goes. “‘The administrative state’ is that quota of political power that covertly fills the vacuum left by the failure of the legislative branch to discharge its obligations.”

Two things are critical.

• One is the displacement of sovereignty. No longer are the people sovereign. The bureaucracy is.

• The second critical thing is the covert nature of the enterprise.

The question “What is the administrative state?” can seem difficult to answer because it is not supposed to exist in the first place. You know it only by its actions. You cannot look it up in the statute book, much less in the Constitution. Indeed, the very fact of the administrative state violates any number of Constitutional norms, not least its being a sort of “fourth branch” of government when the Constitution provides for only three.

Edmund Burke touched on an essential aspect of this process in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770). Criticizing the Court of George III for circumventing Parliament and establishing by stealth what amounted to a new regime of royal prerogative and influence-peddling, Burke saw how George and his courtiers maintained the appearance of parliamentary supremacy while simultaneously undermining it. “It was soon discovered,” Burke wrote with sly understatement, “that the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary Government, were things not altogether incompatible.” That malign co-habitation stands behind the growth of the administrative state. We still vote. We still have a bicameral legislature. But behind these forms of a free government, the essentially undemocratic activities of an increasingly arbitrary and unaccountable regime pursue an expansionist agenda that threatens liberty in the most comprehensive way, by circumventing the law. 

The shadowy nature of the administrative state helps to explain why it is so hostile to free speech and, by the same token, why it tends to be receptive to the deployment of censorship and police power to achieve its ends and stymie the ends of its critics. That is why the rise of the administrative state goes hand in hand with the loss of public confidence in society’s guiding institutions. Talk of “democracy” and “our democracy” is ever on their lips. SWAT teams, prosecutorial abuse, and lawfare are out on the street for all to see. Bottom line: The age of the administrative state is at the same time an age of declining legitimacy in the foundational institutions of civil society.

Officially, the administrative state is not supposed to exist.  Having people talk about the fact that it does exist and that it often pursues ends that are contrary to the ends of the people outside its magic circle of custodians means that by definition free inquiry is a threat to its perpetuation. That is one reason that the administrative state is so hostile to democracy. It is also an important reason why it must be dismantled and returned to the graveyard of rebarbative systems of political obfuscation and bureaucratic tyranny.