Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America project will feature its latest series titled “Reforming the Deep State: Reining in the Federal Bureaucracy.” We invited some of the best policy minds in the conservative movement to speak to the issues of what waste, fraud, abuse, and unaccountability exist throughout the federal government and what still needs to be done. To learn more about the series, click here.
In July, Secretary Brooke Rollins announced plans for the reorganization of the Agriculture Department and the relocation of over 40% of its Washington-based workforce to five distributed hubs across America — closer to home for our farmers.
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Federal agency reorganizations are fairly standard in Washington following changes in presidential administrations, but the last part of Rollins’s announcement really got the swamp howling. Namely, the plan to reduce the Washington-based USDA staff presence from 4,600 to 2,000 and to send functions to the hinterlands was an affront to the managerial class.
As a veteran of five different federal and state government agencies (Matt), the outcry came as no surprise. What did, however, was the boldness of the proposal and Rollins’s willingness to enact what political scientists have discussed for decades, namely, working to reconcile bureaucratic governance and democratic theory.
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The Defense Department’s budget is still not transparent
Amid the Defense Department leadership’s emphasis on speed, efficiency, and the warrior ethos, and the White House Office of Management and Budget‘s creative financing to claim a $1 trillion defense budget in 2026, the true cost of our security remains unclear.
If the defense budget was actually $1 trillion as touted and if all those resources were going toward its core function — deterring and, if necessary, fighting and winning America’s wars — that would be an accomplishment worthy of recognition and pride. Such fiscal commitment would acknowledge providing for the common defense as the only constitutionally directed mandatory and exclusive job of the federal government. It would also set spending on a trajectory toward sufficiency in a world where the threats facing the United States are greater than at any time since 1945.
Unfortunately, the defense budget is not $1 trillion, and it misses the mark in providing transparency about the costs of our security. Whether there is another yearlong continuing resolution that just extends current funding into the next year, which seems increasingly likely, or an actual appropriation, the true number for Pentagon spending in 2026 will likely fall well short of $1 trillion. Yet that still is not the full story.
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Making America’s diplomats work better
It is an open secret within the State Department that diplomats cable reports, memorandums of conversation, and other memos but that the audience for most of these is only a small handful of diplomats working related subjects back home. Diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, for example, might write several cables each week, but they would be lucky if anyone other than the Mongolia desk officer at the State Department read them.
Essentially, diplomats are like hamsters in a wheel, constantly working but advancing nothing. It is not just a make-work function for the author, but it sucks up time up the chain as higher-ups need to edit and clear the cables that perhaps only a dozen people will ever read.
Nor is the content necessary worth the time. Reports of a conversation with a deputy minister or lunch with a political party representative seldom advance understanding significantly for two reasons. First, there is often as much distance between elites in Third World countries and their citizens as there is between American diplomats behind embassy walls.
Essentially, the conversations diplomats have in their host countries are elites talking to elites about what the masses might think, with few, if anyone, involved in the conversation actually knowing the elite. True, it is often the elites who make decisions, but information has evolved in the past century. Washington receives information from newspapers, television, and radio. Diplomatic conversations are an archaic artifact of the past.
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Accountability
Yes, Trump can fire bureaucrats who block his agenda
A major legal and political battle is unfolding that will decide if President Donald Trump has the power to fire key officials whom he believes are obstructing his agenda.
Trump is facing a lawsuit brought by Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat who was appointed by President Joe Biden to the Federal Trade Commission. She argues that Trump does not have the right to remove her.
The case, Slaughter v. Trump, is quickly becoming a high-stakes constitutional showdown over whether the president of the U.S. has the authority to fire confirmed presidential nominees.
At the heart of the dispute is a nearly century-old Supreme Court ruling called Humphrey’s Executor. That case originally protected so-called “independent” agencies such as the FTC from presidential control, limiting the president’s power to remove their leaders.
The flaw in her case is that these agencies have changed a lot since 1935.
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Congress must curtail the secret lawmaking of the administrative state
The rule of law is impossible if federal administrative agencies make secret, informal laws with little to no oversight from elected lawmakers. And yet, this is exactly what has been happening in the U.S. for many years. It’s time for Congress to rein in this practice and restore the principle of separation of powers to our constitutional order.
In the Schoolhouse Rock song “I’m Just a Bill,” an idea to increase traffic safety by making school buses stop at railroad crossings is proposed as legislation in Congress and approved in committee before it receives a favorable vote in the House and Senate, survives a possible veto, and becomes a law.
But there is a darker sequel to this story in which federal administrative agencies provide state and local governments additional information about how exactly they can comply with the law. Though this is common, it is constitutionally dubious at best, particularly since Congress is enacting fewer laws and the executive branch is filling the void.
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Linda McMahon shows how to take on the deep state
The deep state has been described as the “secretive illuminati of bureaucrats determined to sabotage the Trump agenda.” But in education, this illuminati doesn’t just threaten a political agenda: It threatens the success of millions of students in school and in life.
Can Secretary Linda McMahon upend the Education Department’s bureaucratic deep state? She’s already doing it.
Last month, McMahon launched a 50-state tour, not to tout the successes of the new White House but to talk with teachers and parents about returning education authority to state and local educators. Education is a state priority, embedded in the constitutions of each of our nation’s laboratories of democracy, and McMahon is right to hit the road to meet with state education officials.
Critics seek an explanation for how limiting the federal footprint in education would help students. They want examples of the ways McMahon can downsize Washington’s role in education. She has answers.
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