DOGE Is Downstream of the Real Problem
Editor's Note
In their early stages, revolutionary movements must focus on gaining power — whether through force, through infiltration, or simply through the decline of an old and failing regime. In the United States today, the destructive Left has gained control of a massive state apparatus, empowered to regulate every aspect of American life and tasked with the disbursement of billions of dollars of government patronage.
Chris Bray argues that the Trump administration’s efforts to defang that apparatus (while admirable) ignore the root of the problem: the consolidation of power in the federal government, which precedes and necessitates the delegation of that power to an administrative state. To wrest back control, Bray suggests not just a crusade against waste but a revival of the foundational principle of federalism.
The executive order creating the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency says that the organization will work “by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” So DOGE will examine all of the things the federal government currently does, and it will audit those existing functions to see if they can be streamlined and modernized.
All of that is just fine, as far as it goes, but it also gives up an important fight without bothering to have it. To really limit the cost of the federal government — and the waste, abuse, and intrusion that come with excessive federal authority — we should look not to modern-day business practices but to the principles of the founding. A serious effort to curb the administrative state must begin with the Constitution’s enumerated powers. The Trump administration is having that discussion at the narrative edges, but it needs to move the idea to the foreground.
The generation that founded this new nation frequently and furiously debated the dangers of consolidation: the degree to which a compact between states might gradually produce, in the words of James Madison, “a consolidation of the states into one sovereignty.”
The scheme of administration set up in the Constitution empowered states to regulate their own internal affairs, within the limits of the Guarantee Clause that assured the maintenance of “a Republican Form of Government.” The federal government was to be a government of limited powers, managing foreign relations, territorial expansion, and those questions of domestic regulation that were plainly interstate matters, crossing state borders. In 1830, Congress funded a road that would be built between two cities in Kentucky, but President Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill. If a road between two cities in the same state can be considered a federal responsibility, he warned, “no further distinction between the appropriate duties of the General and State Governments need be attempted, for there can be no local interest that may not with equal propriety be denominated national.”
We’ve lost that distinction, and all levels of government do all things. We have federal, state, county, and city minimum wage laws, and my suburban city council spent weeks in debate over the invasion of Ukraine, finally sending a firmly worded letter to Vladimir Putin demanding in the name of the City of South Pasadena that he stop. Every government is in charge of all matters, everywhere, at all times.
The current condition of the metastasizing American administrative state, in which federal bureaucrats are the wise managerial arbiters who steer all functions of human existence, is a product, first, of the erosion of federalism. A functionary sitting at a desk in the District of Columbia can write rules that run your daily life because a distinction broke down: we lost the idea of the federal government as a government of limited powers.
The political scientist Ronald Pestritto, an important voice in the discussion of the metastasizing administrative state, warns against “the vast discretion granted to bureaucratic agencies when Congress delegates to them its legislative power.” John Marini has similarly described the project, born in the Progressive Era, to replace the sovereignty of the people with the wisdom of expert rule as an organizing ideal. But the administrative state first requires consolidation. Before it can reach into your daily life, the modern central state has to grind down the distributed authority that emerges from federalism. The American administrative state in its current form needed the “consolidation of the states into one sovereignty” that Madison warned against. Federal bureaucrats can’t run everything if their authority ends at state borders.
The 1942 decision of the United States Supreme Court in Wickard v. Filburn is the formal death of Andrew Jackson’s general government that only has authority in matters that are plainly national. Quick background: The New Deal-era Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 set quotas for the production of commodities. An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, sold milk and eggs, but grew a small crop of wheat that he only planned to use within the confines of his own property, to feed his family and his farm animals. As the Supreme Court decision notes, Filburn grew more wheat than his allotment would permit, and so grew an amount of food that “constituted farm marketing excess” under federal law. He was fined, but refused to pay, arguing that Congress only had authority to regulate interstate commerce – which didn’t include a crop that would be grown and consumed entirely inside the fenceline of a single Ohio farm.
The Supreme Court rejected that proposed limit. Wheat is grown for interstate commerce, so all regulation of wheat in any form is within reach of Congress. In the words of Associate Justice Robert Jackson, who had been Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attorney general before his appointment to the court, “even if appellee’s activity be local, and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce.” Congress only has authority over interstate matters, but all matters are interstate at some point, so Congress has unlimited authority. Your backyard vegetable garden is interstate commerce, because the sale of vegetables is economically substantial. This conception of federal power is the steroid shot for the centralized administrative state.
If we color within the lines defined by the creation of DOGE, then the endless federal control over all aspects of life is tolerable, as long as it’s streamlined and uses good software. Elon Musk’s objection to the current regime is not actually about its scope — just its cost. The founding premise has gone missing. Federalism crawled away from us while we weren’t looking, and we’re not working that hard to get it back. Tyranny is fine so long as it’s efficient.
But the first step to make government more just, more restrained, more focused, more affordable, and less intrusive is to limit federal authority to the enumerated powers of the general government. Article 1, Section 8 is DOGE-plus.
The administration is having some version of this discussion. A fact sheet posted on the White House website along with the new budget outline for the next fiscal year proposes a set of steps for “revitalizing federalism.” But the actions proposed in that document veer back toward the premises of DOGE, focusing on efficiency and streamlining rather than proposing a serious rebalancing of state and federal power. Here’s the first item:
Improve Educational Outcomes by Empowering States. Through a new Department of Education K-12 Simplified Funding Program, the Budget consolidates 18 grant programs—most of which were perverted to impose equity requirements and racial literacy trainings—to substantially lower the costs of both administration and compliance, and ensure that a greater proportion of the funds provides support for students and their families.
Returning education to the states is necessary and overdue, but consolidating grant programs to lower the costs of administration isn’t federalism — it’s a smaller mechanism for applying federal responsibility and funding.
Donald Trump is an entrepreneurial utilitarian, gifted at spotting broken things and pointing them toward repair. He’s working inside the mechanism of an inefficient machine, and he’ll probably have a great deal of success at making it work better. But the alert and disciplined conservatives inside the administration need to orient the work of the executive branch toward the founding idea of federalism, a framework that worked well before we let it drift away. There are things the federal government shouldn’t do, no matter how efficiently it can do them.