No, this is not about the 1982 horror movie starring Adrienne Barbeau, but those who mean to “drain the swamp” should take heed — danger lurks in an unlikely place, and, left unchecked, the beast could well destroy even the best intended efforts of DOGE and its allies in Congress.

We need to return the federal government to that handful of missions that are indubitably national in character.
I keep reading about the need to shrink the federal government and the corollary need to regain the “people’s agenda," taking the government out of the hands of unelected bureaucrats and returning it to our elected representatives. I agree wholeheartedly that the federal government has become a monster and that slaying the beast is essential, not only as an exercise in fiscal responsibility, but also as a matter of restoring a functioning democracy, one responsive to the will of the people.
Can this be done? I’m sure that it can. Will it be easy? Far from it, and not at all if we ignore the ways in which the administrative state actually operates. There are many good ideas floating about. The first is to simply do away with agencies that either serve no worthwhile purpose, or which actually do harm.
The Department of Education should be at the top of the list. Created in a fit of Carter administration madness in 1979, it long ago outlived any pretense of useful purpose. Prior to 1979, education was understood to be primarily the province of local governments, and secondarily that of the individual states.
Anyone familiar with how education actually worked prior to 1979 understands that, in most parts of the country, it worked quite well without the involvement of the Feds. Some school districts had more resources, some had less, but by and large, they were responsive to the people who paid the bills — that is, local taxpayers, the parents, or grandparents, or aunts and uncles of the schoolchildren being educated. My small town school district lacked many of the resources of the ...