How the Trump Administration Is Taming the Administrative State

As part of its celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life has published my Provocation, “Government by the Unelected: How it Happened, and How it Might be Tamed.” This full-length essay seeks to assess how the Founders’ principles have fared after 250 years. I argue that government by the consent of the governed has gradually diminished—especially in the 20th and 21st centuries—and has been substantially replaced by the government of a permanent, unelected, and allegedly expert class.

The fuller work traces the history of this development, pointing both to the rise of the Progressives in the latter part of the 19th century and to the role of the federal courts in enabling the Progressive remaking of American government during the 20th century. These phenomena will not be unfamiliar to readers of my scholarly work or that of others in the Claremont Institute’s orbit.

My opening piece in this symposium focuses on the final part of “Government by the Unelected,” which covers the remarkable effort President Trump and his administration are undertaking to restore some semblance of government by consent. While the Left and its acolytes in the media decry this approach as an assault on “democracy,” the administration has, in truth, embarked on the most extensive project since at least the 1930s to reclaim executive power from unelected bureaucrats and judges.

It would be far preferable if we did not have to rely exclusively on the president in the current effort to restore government by consent. In addition to their elected president, the sovereign people are supposed to rule through their elected Congress—and Congress could certainly do much to stick up for its constituents and rein in the bureaucrats and judges. But it is because of Congress that we are in this position in the first place, and no fair-minded observer can plausibly believe that today’s congressmen are likely to take back the vast authority they have given away to agencies and courts. For better or worse, it has been left to the people’s other representative—the elected president—to regain for them the means to choose how they are governed.