On May 2, President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent Congress his “topline discretionary budget request for fiscal year 2026 (FY 2026).” In its statement, the White House cut to the chase:

The Budget, which reduces non-defense discretionary by $163 billion or 23 percent from the 2025 enacted level, guts a weaponized deep state while providing historic increases for defense and border security. The Budget also provides support for air and rail safety as well as key infrastructure and our Nation’s veterans and law enforcement.

This is the lowest non-defense spending level since 2017. Savings come from eliminating radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory (CRT) programs, Green New Scam funding, large swaths of the Federal Government weaponized against the American people, and moving programs that are better suited for States and localities to provide.

In sum, the president’s proposal is a critical step toward sanity because, contrary to the left’s inveigling, Big Government does not stop chaos; Big Government is chaos.

Too often, Americans blame the Communications Revolution and its technological marvels of social media, smartphones, the 24/7 news cycle, et al., for spawning the frenetic disorder around modern life. Yet, the communication revolution is only an exacerbating factor of the chaos around us. It is not the cause. However, its technological advances do serve to reveal one of the founts of the incessant madness riving modern life: Big Government.

Well, in fairness, it is not Big Government. It is actually a multi-trillion-dollar, voracious, liberty-devouring, prosperity-depleting, soul-crushing, unaccountable, and abstruse Behemoth Government. [But we shall use Big Government to simplify matters; and because, though a battle between Behemoth Government and Ned Ryun’s American Leviathan would be epic, it would prove dispiriting as there would be no one to root for.]

Like bankruptcy, which it will bring the nation if unchecked, Big Government evolved slowly and then suddenly. Indeed, this was manifest in its latest massive infusion of other people’s money courtesy of the Biden administration and its trillion-dollar Democrat-controlled Congress’s inflationary spending spree that helped spur the national debt to over $30,000,000. (Not that the GOP is blameless. It took two to tango over this fiscal cliff.)

Nonetheless, the Democrats are now so wedded to the administrative state and Big Government that houses it that the party no longer even pretends to care about fiscal integrity, especially when one considers its dominant “progressive” wing’s embrace of the regressive economic idiocy of socialism.

One is tempted to think this would spell the end of Big Government because most Americans are not progressives and dislike socialism, as they are rather fond of keeping their money. But the left is equally fond of taking other people’s money. Consequently, while the left spends a good deal of its time pretending they are altruistic, trying to improve you by spending your money on the people who vote for them.

At its essence, the left’s arguments are always the same, aimed at sentiment and emotional extortion: “The government needs to spend your money on (worthy individuals/program) to save lives” or some such other claptrap. Implicit in this pitch is that if government’s power is increased, societal chaos will be diminished—oh, and social justice will advance or something or other. But what really matters to the left is that their power and the size and scope of big government increase.

Sure, the left’s arguments are poppycock. But this poppycock evidently produces the opiate of the masses—incontrovertibly demonstrated by the staggering federal deficits and debt of Big Government. Somehow, the left’s siren song causes even practical Americans to forget Lord Acton’s famous maxim: “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And, regrettably, every time the sovereign citizenry delegates their power to Big Government, the bigger Big Government grows, akin to the steadily enveloping, smothering plant kudzu.

So, what do Americans get for their tens of trillions of dollars? What do we get out of Big Government? Chaos. As the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the entire Trump administration continue to reveal, we get rather expensive chaos at that. This belies the left’s propaganda’s implicit promise that more government is the answer to all that ails us. On the contrary, it is what dissipates both our liberty and prosperity.

Government is a social construct conceived, constructed, and operated by imperfect human beings, regardless of party. But the left’s diurnal mental gymnastics constitute a convergence of persistence and cognitive dissonance beyond the reach of less disordered minds. Inanities, insanities, and overarching internal contradictions abound, providing a shambolic smorgasbord of smug, socially, politically, and culturally destructive policies. Nevertheless, the left’s hardened ideology allows them to house all this cognitive dissonance within the same craniums, within their perpetually expanding Big Government.

For a leftist, championing Big Government is not a means but the end. It perpetuates the self-delusion that they and their ideological ilk are supremely enlightened and innately superior human beings entitled to run other people’s lives to perfect them and society. That their Big Government produces little but chaos is not a consideration. In the leftist’s warped worldview, Big Government remains the solution, and, if it does not work out for some people, those harmed by Big Government must have deserved it.

The left’s chaotic cognitive dissonance produces a vicious spiral: disordered minds create Big Government that exacerbates disorder; to stem the increased chaos, the same disordered minds expand Big Government and spawn more disorder. Lather, rinse, and fleece the public….

For an ordered mind—for an ordered soul—the goal of a truly good government is not the mastery of all facets of a citizen’s existence to coerce perfection, the result of which is chaos. No, the goal of a truly good government is to protect and expand liberty and self-government, thus providing a fundamental guard against Big Government and its chaos—a chaos that mirrors the disorder in the minds of its architects.

For the public, then, when it comes to Big Government and its power, if one does not heed Lord Acton, then at least recall Mel Brooks: Big Government’s motto is “It’s good to be the king,” and, further, remember that our founders fought a revolution to oust a king and create a limited government of, by, and for the people. Once again, it is time to peacefully cut Big Government down to size.

An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional District from 2003-2012, He served as chair of the Republican House Policy Committee and as a member of the Financial Services, Joint Economic, Budget, Small Business, and International Relations Committees. Not a lobbyist, he is also a contributor to Chronicles, a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars, and a co-host of “John Batchelor: Eye on the World” on CBS radio, among sundry media appearances.