There are a lot of things that the federal government does. Most of them it does poorly.

When you call the Social Security Administration, you expect to be on hold for a long time, and you can barely get an appointment in a timely manner. Medicare, Medicaid, and other welfare and entitlement programs are rife with fraud. Health agencies have spent taxpayer funds to torture puppies, and the Department of Education is incapable of competently rolling out an application that millions of people rely on for financial aid. That is just to name a few.

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But while the sprawling list of federal agencies does little effectively when it comes to the things we need from them, they excel at two things: creating and keeping cumbersome bureaucratic processes that shield incompetence and resist all change, and avoiding any accountability for their incompetence so that they have become an independent and unaccountable branch of government untouched by the democratic process.

More succinctly, federal agencies are good at creating bureaucratic bloat and red tape, good at shirking accountability, and bad at everything else.

There are myriad reasons why this has come about. The Constitution gave Congress the role of writing laws. But Congress has instead delegated the role of writing rules and regulations that carry the force of law to an ever-expanding corps of executive branch agencies. We use the word “corps” advisedly for its military tenor, for the bureaucracies have become combat units on behalf of left-liberal ideas that are supposed to be decided by voters who do not, however, get to choose their bureaucrats.

At the same time, the Constitution created robust employment protections for rank-and-file employees in the agencies, codifying an idea first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson that the government should be run by technocrats, not democratically elected leaders, thus absolving the bureaucracy of the accountability and job performance that is expected in the private sector.

This ever-expanding bureaucracy has taken on many nicknames: the “administrative state,” the “deep state,” and the “fourth branch of government,” to name a few. In 2016, a New York billionaire with no political experience called it the “swamp,” and his pledge to “drain” it helped propel him to the White House that year and again last year.

But things are rapidly changing. In 2024, the Supreme Court overruled its Chevron deference precedent, which had previously granted executive agencies wide latitude to interpret federal statutes and thus opened up thousands of regulations to legal challenges. In the first nine months of the second Trump presidency, armed with knowledge from the first, the administration has gone to war with the institutions of the branch of government it leads, seeking to prevent the sort of institutional sabotage that it encountered from the bureaucracy during the previous term. 

The administration has also taken steps to challenge the unaccountability of so-called “independent agencies” that were designed to operate without oversight from elected officials.

The new Department of Government Efficiency has grafted itself onto agencies with the expressed goal of shrinking them and eliminating wasteful and expensive programs that exist across the federal government and are never shut down.

But, despite some progress, there is still much to do. Waste, fraud, and abuse still riddle the federal government. Agencies are still staffed by bureaucrats who have no qualms about resisting or sabotaging lawful policy directives. As Congress works toward another government funding cycle with the looming threat of a shutdown, we are reminded that no measure to rein in the bureaucracy will be permanent without legislation.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE “REFORMING THE DEEP STATE SERIES”

Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America will feature a series titled “Reforming the Deep State: Reining in the Federal Bureaucracy.” We invited some of the best policy minds in the conservative movement to write about the issues of waste, fraud, abuse, and unaccountability in the federal government and what needs to be done about them.

Americans not only need a government that works for them but also one that responds to them.