President Trump on March 20th, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No, but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the President is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news”. Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over Left and Right, red and blue or race and class – is the status, power and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organisational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is… the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidised, penalised or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines and so on it goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on Red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system”, the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favours to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th Century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organisational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them, not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s Executive Order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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A superb article, applicable to the UK as well.
You don’t have to like Trump to be grateful that at long last the right questions are being asked and discussed.
It is a great article, it paints the picture so well.
It’s also good that questions are finally being asked. I dread though that questions will be all that we’ll get. They will slow Trump down, wait him out and the revolution will end whe he completes his term. That is my fear. Because what needs to be accomplished cannot be done in 4 years.
I hope him and his team are capable enough to set up a viable successor, if such a person even exists.
The successor would appear to already be there in JD Vance. The limit to a President only serving 2 terms was brought in after FDR served 4 terms. It has good and bad points. Why limit a good person? But then familiarity can lead to decline which I think happened to Thatcher at the end when those around her became too deferential and did not provide critical analysis of her plans.
Trump and his teams, including DOGE had to know this lawfare would happen, maybe not the scale of it, but after the lawfare used against prior to the election, they had to know this would happen!
It’s a big task, which is interlaced with many branches, the constitution being the roots. So it appears to be an upside down tree (the root) which forms into the collective constitution, each having its own function.
There will be constitutional experts whose sole purpose will be to protect its integrity and at the same time protect their own interests.
But everything derives from the constitution, so I think the only way to deal with this kind of problem is to set up a task force to look at how each end function was created and work back. It could be that attacking the functions lower down in the branches it could in effect decapitate all sub functions.
it would be a big task and a big department if tackled collectively. I would opt for many task forces looking into how each department works, all being independent and answerable only to the executive. None of the task forces would have power to alter or change anything, their sole task would be to report their findings. In addition they would have to have the power to question various people in the departments and any obstruction to their activities made an offence.
There are many other ways to look into how departments work, one obvious thing would be to look at how each department functions and to pick out any activities that don’t fit in with their terms of reference, in other words root out the “local practices” that inevitably creep in at the whim of participants in the administrative process. So you effectively take them apart from within. It can be done but it would have to be planned. The whole point being to reverse engineer the system.
Another thing to consider is how many charities are subsidised by the Government, and why!
Concisely written, wonderfully readable article, questioning who or what is charge…
…After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news”.
Therein lies the problem. A bad cold, a trace atmospheric gas, ULEZ, 15-minute cities, government interference in football, etc, etc – State sponsored and media-promoted mis-, dis- and mal-information deployed to con the public on a vast scale.
And all the while, State-sanctioned vested interests reap their reward in power, influence and ill-gotten gains.
To your list of trade groups etc it’s worth mentioning professional institutions. Sometimes national, often supernational in effect with minimal adaptation between nations or states. The Institution of xyz…. etc., which many of us are required to be members of and pay the subs to do so.
They”re all some for of cartel. Some more obvious, some less so.
“The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all”…..The establishment trying to scupper Brexit is another example.
What is the threat to democracy?
This is what Lord Sumption addresses in a full-page article in one of this Sunday’s newspapers. Yet there is nothing in the former Supreme Court Judge’s assessment concerning the role in this threat of the administrative state and its petty tyranny so ably described here by Jeffrey Tucker.
The main thrust of Lord Sumption’s argument is Trump and his alleged depredations to the rule of law. ‘Trump’s trademarks are scapegoating, lies and personal abuse. The Mussolinian scowl says it all.’
Gosh! Musso! How many of Gen Z have ever heard of him? Lord Sumption begins his piece by declaring that ‘no nation can be made great by choosing a leader who would be a figure of fun if he were not so powerful.’ But one might ask how many of the EU leaders would be hugging Zelensky, a former comedian elected as a populist, if it were not out of necessity? (Didn’t Churchill do some scowling as well as growling).
Just to complete the set, Lord Sumption likens Trump telling the Danish prime minister that he is determined to have Greenland with a conversation that the German leader of the Third Reich would have had with the Czech prime minister of the time. No mention of the two previous attempts to acquire Greenland by the USA after World War Two. Set against that, Trump is just American business as usual.
And as for the ‘personal abuse’, supposedly the characteristic of the threat to democracy, wasn’t there some dismissal in the USA of an entire section of the electorate as ‘deplorables’? In the EU Referendum, people ‘voted the wrong way’ as a result of alleged ignorance. This (democratic) result must not be allowed to stand, declared a former prime minister.
Lord Sumption offers a solution. Democratic governments must be more honest about what the state can realistically achieve. He asserts that there is a ‘crisis of expectations’ common to all present-day democracies and, to avoid the temptations to admire a strongman as do ‘cheerleaders’ in Germany, Hungary, and the UK, ‘all of us must temper our expectations.’
But is this an accurate diagnosis? Is the expectation that government should ensure basic functionality an unrealistic expectation? Or we just shouldn’t expect too much from an administrative state that in effect has come to exist to maintain little more than its own functionality?
Can the crisis really be that of this administrative state spending so much effort in denying the electorate what they want? Not the problem of the ‘frustration of democratic government’, as Lord Sumption diagnoses it, but the frustrating of the democratic will of the electorate? ‘Populism’ not being a shadow of democracy, as it has been argued, but a shadow of its absence?
If Gen Z have a liking for authoritarianism, the ‘effectiveness’ of that sort of rule was ably demonstrated to them in the Covid repressions. And not demonstrated by the ‘far-Right’ either. Nor was it only Gen Z who enthusiastically submitted themselves to it and its ‘guidance by The Science’. And Lord Sumption complains about Trump’s ‘bogus claims to emergency powers’!
I didn’t realise Sumption suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Seems like he is just one more educated snob at heart. Expected better from him – he has gone down in my estimation.
He was also against Brexit, so when he was talking against Lockdowns that was refreshing.
I didn’t know that.
I think Brexit is something that reasonable people can disagree on.
I have never thought that it was reasonable to argue for lockdowns.
I thought he put a very good case against lockdowns – one based on the principle of the importance of personal freedom.
“Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way?”
One of the Rockefeller’s quotes was something along the lines of…..No matter who is President, those that control the money control the people. I’m not saying Trump 2.0 couldn’t shake up people like that, but US leaders have been scared to in the past.
It isn’t the failure of a system it is the failure of systemic thinking. No more grand narrative. Some candy king giving you everything you want. Our time invites either a return to the first principles of political thought ot a catastrophe that will make political thought sound like am inane joke over a cannibalistic supper. If you want to get realy primitive consider that human beings work best when they are in groups of 50-300 people. If the numbers get larger than that then you can’t know anyone. You become dependent on contract and credit and people lose the sense of home. And from a systems point of view if you go over three hundred you end up with so many nodes and enclaves withing a system that all sorts of nasty corruptions can go unnoticed to the point where they take over and taint everything. There is very little criticism of scale in recent history.
Schools used to be around 400 pupils, but are now usually over 1000.
First rate article for which thanks. It explains so much regarding the exasperating neutering of elected representatives and lawmakers and the over-mighty power of administrative bodies, paid by the public to serve themselves with complete unaccountability. The UK is most certainly in the grip of this kind of dictatorship and the burning question is what to do about it. Because the effect of unregulated authoritarianism is to generate apathy it is self perpetuating and quite obviously deliberate. Where do we go from here?
So, the USA gained a civil service only 142 years ago and the people who were opposed to it back then (or rather, their succesors in opposition) are still pissed off about that?
Thanks for this information. Would you know please consider to leave people who’ve lived in properly managed states for close to a 1000 years alone? Actually, considering the still lasting legacy of the Roman empire, we could make that 2000 years. If you want to attack your personal toys with all the might and anger of a five year old with a hammer, please feel free to do so but spare us your supposedly superior hammer philosophy until you’ve grown a bit more experienced in real ways of the world.
It is all playing out in the public arena, those who are prepared to look see what all these activist judges are doing, and failed to do when Biden was the Resident.
As the article points out, Trump (as President) is the Chief Executive of the Administrative branch and all the agencies under it, so he should have sweeping powers to do with those agencies as he pleases, and it is no business of the Judicial branch.
The only way they should be able to act is if genuine lawsuits are raised from those agencies, such as unfair dismissal. It’s unlikely that could be against Trump directly as he’s the CEO.
What Trump can’t do is create new laws, he can suggest them, but it is the role of Congress as the legislature to create new laws, and once enacted the role of the Judiciary to enforce them.
Important to remember though, this is only at the Federal level, not the state level. Only a federal judge would possess jurisdiction over Federal Agencies and Federal laws.