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.

Many on the Right are offering revisionist praise of President Richard Nixon, celebrating his broadsides against the New Left and his strong cultural conservative instincts.

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He called institutions such as the press, political establishment, and academia the enemy of the people. Yet the revisionism from some conservative commentators glosses over the Nixon who expanded the administrative state and further weaponized Washington agencies against Americans.

But for all his talk of conservative principles, Nixon imposed wage and price controls and created a host of new federal agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. While in some ways he was an early culture warrior, Nixon expanded federal power that undercut the very conservatism he claimed to defend.

By empowering the administrative state and federal agencies, Nixon entrenched a system that eroded congressional authority and left vast swaths of policymaking in the hands of bureaucrats unaccountable to voters.

Much of the EPA’s legacy involves trampling private property rights, such as the case of a Florida man and his son, who were sent to prison for two years for dumping sand on their own property.

More notable is the case of John Pozsgai, a Hungarian immigrant and self-employed truck mechanic. Pozsgai was sentenced in 1989 to three years in prison and fined $202,000 under the Clean Water Act for placing clean fill and topsoil on his own property in Pennsylvania, which the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers classified as “wetlands.” His crime? The desire to build a garage on the land he purchased, which was previously used as an illegal dumping ground for tires and scrap metal, property that Pozsgai cleaned up himself.

FOIA FOLLIES: HOW THE DEEP STATE AVOIDS TRANSPARENCY

Tennessee’s snail darter controversy became the poster child for how rigid bureaucracy can derail common sense. In the 1970s, the discovery of a three-inch fish nearly stopped the nearly completed Tellico Dam, as federal agencies insisted on protecting its “habitat” at any cost. Congress finally stepped in and carved out special exemptions for the project, but private property owners weren’t so fortunate.

As one EPA administrator admitted in 2010, the agency’s strategy was “kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean.” 

“They’d find the first five guys they saw, and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years … so, that’s our general philosophy.”

When federal regulators compare their enforcement practices to crucifixions during the Roman Empire, it’s no wonder that ordinary citizens and small businesses don’t see Washington’s agencies as partners in self-government but as instruments of intimidation.

OSHA’s regulatory abuse became clearer for many Americans in 2021, after the agency tried to push vaccine mandates on companies with over 100 employees. But the groundwork for this explosion of federal power was laid decades earlier under Nixon, who expanded federal agencies’ power and implemented sweeping new laws — from the Clean Air Act to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Consumer Product Safety Act, Endangered Species Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act. While the goals of these laws may have been well-intentioned, they shifted power and authority from Congress to federal agencies, leaving the public without a say over major policy decisions.

Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for Nixon, noted, “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE ‘REFORMING THE DEEP STATE’ SERIES

Nixon strived for more positive reforms under “New Federalism” initiatives meant to empower states and made attempts to consolidate some Cabinet positions, but much of his legacy is tied to the growth of the regulatory state.

While some of Nixon’s efforts in the cultural war were laudable, limited government proponents are still trying to reform many of Nixon’s initiatives that fuel Washington’s excesses to this day. And while the damage done to the citizenry and balance of power in favor of centralized schemes has been immense over the decades, it’s long past time for politicians to rein in the agencies that continue to erode self-government.

Ray Nothstine is a senior writer and editor and a Future of Freedom Fellow at the State Policy Network. He manages and edits American Habits, an online publication focused on federalism and self-government.