Mandate for (conservative) Leadership by the 2025 Project

[Josh]

I don’t think DeSantis has a serious plan for governing (and yes I’m aware many conservatives love him). He seems to just launch cheap sound bites that appeal to “conservative values” on the surface but with no real plan for how to actually get any of this done.

[Ken]

I don’t think DeSantis has a serious plan for governing (and yes I’m aware many conservatives love him). He seems to just launch cheap sound bites that appeal to “conservative values” on the surface but with no real plan for how to actually get any of this done.

Of that we would agree.

[HondurasKeiser]

1. Unelected and very difficult to hold accountable
2. The "thing" we most come into contact with when we have to deal with "government"
3. The entity that truly runs the show in the executive branch via regulation, fiat, investigations and enforcement of their own rules.
4. Staffed with people concerned about self-perpetuation and generally inimical to local control, heterogeneity and independent institutions.

I think a reigning in of the bureaucracy is a good thing though I hold a dim view of Heritage and their designs here.

I would tend to disagree with this analysis.

The administrative state is really the creation of Congress which makes the laws that it implements and funds the agencies that compose it. Yes, the executive (president) has direct authority over the administrative state through the various chains of command from the cabinet secretaries on down. But the administrative state is actually answerable to the laws and directions passed by Congress not the whims of the president. And they take an oath to the Constitution not to the president.

In addition, virtually every bit of slow bureaucratic process inside the administrative state is the direct result of laws and funding decisions made by Congress. Not foot-dragging by "unelected bureaucrats"

Congress also has an important oversight role over the executive branch. Which they often waste by spending endless time chasing after endless political rabbit holes things like Hunter Biden's laptop or Benghazi rather than say the operations of the EPA or Department of Transportation. But that is neither here nor there I guess. But they certainly could be doing more effective oversight if they wanted.

Personally I would prefer an administrative state that is constrained by the rule of law and budgets as passed by Congress rather than one that swings back and forth in an extreme partisan fashion based on whoever is in the White House at the moment. And it goes both ways. Do conservatives really want Biden loyalists to be completely unleashed to wield the administrative state as they see fit? Or loyalists of some future Kamala Harris administration? I suspect not.

Much of this is true in a textbook kind of sense and I agree with your last paragraph whole-heartedly. In practice though, Congress and the courts have given much leeway and deference to different bureaucratic departments to create their own rules and enforcement mechanisms based on the overly-general/vague laws passed by Congress. Over that, we citizens have very little control because Congress has abdicated much of its legislating authority and delegated it to the Administrative state. Elena Kagan’s dissent in the EPA case a year ago admits that explicitly and attempts to justify it with a backhanded compliment that essentially says “Representatives are dummies and they know they’re dummies…we need to defer to the experts.”

Like you though, I would like to see less show trials and the weaponization of congressional powers eg. impeachment inquiries, and more actual legislating so that bureaucrats are enjoined to exercise only as much authority as they are specifically granted by Congress.

[HondurasKeiser]

I don’t think DeSantis has a serious plan for governing (and yes I’m aware many conservatives love him). He seems to just launch cheap sound bites that appeal to “conservative values” on the surface but with no real plan for how to actually get any of this done.

Of that we would agree.

Also agreed.

[Ken]

Much of this is true in a textbook kind of sense and I agree with your last paragraph whole-heartedly. In practice though, Congress and the courts have given much leeway and deference to different bureaucratic departments to create their own rules and enforcement mechanisms based on the overly-general/vague laws passed by Congress. Over that, we citizens have very little control because Congress has abdicated much of its legislating authority and delegated it to the Administrative state. Elena Kagan’s dissent in the EPA case a year ago admits that explicitly and attempts to justify it with a backhanded compliment that essentially says “Representatives are dummies and they know they’re dummies…we need to defer to the experts.”

I understand where this sentiment is coming from. I read it all the time. But I think it is an inaccurate description of the actual process, both in terms of executive authority and citizen input. In my prior life I did this sort of thing for a living. I first worked as a field biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service then went back to grad school and then landed a more administrative position where I did actual agency rulemaking in Alaska, Seattle, and Washington DC. And then when I got married my wife's career brought us to Texas where I did agency consulting work for a bit then eventually changed careers and became a science teacher.

If you want to bear with me for a long essay I can provide a picture of how things actually work in that agency and then you can judge for yourself how the process works, why it is excruciatingly slow, and why it is largely necessary.

All the commercial fisheries in the US EEZ (AKA Federal Waters) from 3 to 200 nautical miles are managed under the Magnuson-Stevens Act. https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/topic/laws-policies Fisheries within 3 miles are state water fisheries managed by the various state fish and game agencies and for fisheries that straddle both waters there are various joint management agreements and such.

The Magnuson-Stevens Act sets out general standards for the management of commercial fisheries around the US but does not go into detail about how each one should be managed as that is far outside the expertise of Congress. There are literally hundreds of different fisheries from the Gulf of Maine to the Florida Bay to the Bering Sea and Samoan Islands that are all under the jurisdiction of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. Congress can't possibly get involved in things like what type hooks should be used in Hawaiian longline fisheries or how to allocate halibut catch between dozens of different user groups in Alaska. It would consume their every waking moment and then some.

So Congress established an agency to manage commercial fishing on its behalf and issue fishing regulations, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) And also established a system of eight regional fishery management councils https://www.fisherycouncils.org/ that are responsible for making fishery management plans for each fishery in their jurisdiction and make regulatory recommendations to NMFS which implements and enforces the actual commercial fishing regulations. I mostly worked in Alaska with the North Pacific Fishery Management Council https://www.npfmc.org/ which has 18 members that are appointed by the governors of Alaska, Washington, and Oregon (mostly fishing industry people) and non-voting members from state and Federal agencies including the Coast Guard, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and State Department (which only weighs in on international issues usually to do with fishing stocks that straddle the US and Canada or the US and Russia).

Each Council has two advisory subcommittees. A Scientific and Statistical Committee made up of agency and university fisheries scientists. And an Advisory Panel made up of about 20 members of the public (mostly fishing industry people and a few environmental group types).

NMFS itself has various separate divisions. A fisheries science division that does all the stock assessment science (how many fish are there and where are they), a management division where I worked that does the fishing regulations, a marine mammal division that is charged with all the marine mammal protection laws, an enforcement division which are the uniformed fish cops who enforce fishing regulations and coordinate with the DOJ on prosecutions, and a habitat division that is responsible for studying and preserving fish habitat, salmon streams, and things like marine reserves.

Now lets take what is a seemingly simple regulatory issue and walk it through the system. I'll pick halibut subsistence fishing since it is both interesting and complex and something I worked with.

Halibut is one of the premier fish in Alaska along with Chinook Salmon. It is what everyone wants to catch from commercial fishermen to sports fishermen to charterboat operators to big factory trawlers that catch it as bycatch, to native subsistence fishermen who rely on it to feed their villages. And there is not nearly enough halibut to go around so it has to be allocated and managed for each separate sector. Halibut is also complicated because it migrates between the US and Canada and so must be jointly managed so that neither the Americans nor Canadians take more than their fair share. So all the halibut science is done by the International Pacific Halibut Commission https://iphc.int/ which is based in Seattle and has scientists and managers from both the US and Canada working for it. The IPHC does the basic science and sets the quotas for the entire North Pacific from California, through Canada, up to the northern Bering Sea but the fishery is managed and local regulations are written by NMFS in the US and the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans for British Columbian waters https://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/index-eng.html

The particular regulatory proposal we will look at was a proposal to establish a separate halibut subsistence fishery so that native tribes could harvest halibut to feed their villages. Which was something that they had always done for probably millennia but had never been officially authorized before. Halibut fishing has different footprints across Alaska depending on the sector. Sportfishing happens mostly close to populated towns as ordinary folk go out on their own boats to fish halibut with rod and reel. It's very popular so around cities like Juneau, Anchorage, Homer, and Sitka where there has to be catch limits and seasons and such to prevent overfishing. Charterboat fishing is a fast-growing industry in Alaska as there are hundreds of charter operators, especially in the cruise ship ports, that take out paying tourists to fish halibut and they have separate regulations and fishing seasons. Commercial halibut fishing is done by longline fishermen who set out miles long lines with thousands of hooks and fish the deeper coastal waters all the way from the Canadian border in the south to the outer Aleutian Islands close to Japan. And finally there are big bottom trawl fisheries in the Bering Sea that fish for cod and other flatfish but catch halibut as bycatch as the Bering Sea is basically the halibut nursery for young halibut and they like to go the same places that cod, yellowfin sole, rock sole, and other commercial species like to go. Each of those different user groups gets their own quotas that are managed through different fishing seasons and the commercial fishery is managed through individual fishing quotas where each of the hundreds of boats gets its own quota that they can buy, sell, trade, or fish as they want. Halibut bycatch in the trawl fishery is closely monitored by fisheries observers and when the trawl fishery in a certain management area catches its limit of halibut bycatch they are shut down through regulation, even if they haven't caught their full quota of cod or other flatfish. It is just tough luck and learn to fish cleaner next year.

Native Alaskan groups had been pushing for years to establish a separate subsistence fishery for their use. They used to just catch all the fish they needed under the sportfishing regulations but as those fisheries and the charterboat fishery grew they started to get squeezed out. Plus, they wanted to operate under different rules than sportfishing. So, for example, a group of young fishermen could go out and catch fish for a whole village including the elderly ladies so they wouldn't have to go out themselves and catch their own fish. It all made sense and more or less fell under US obligations to native groups in Alaska under the various treaties and laws. But how to do it? The first issue is that there are no official tribes in Alaska like in the lower 48. There are native corporations instead. But many members of these native corporations live in places like Seattle or Los Angeles or Anchorage and really don't fish. And there are non-native Alaskans who are really sport fishermen but who want to fish under more liberal subsistence rules. So there was a whole long complex issue of deciding who would be entitled to do subsistence fishing, followed by a long process of deciding what those subsistence fishing regulations should be, followed by a contentious process of deciding how much of the existing halibut quotas should be carved out for subsistence fishing, where it will be allowed, and whose quotas it will come out of. This is not a process that Congress is remotely equipped to deal with. And all the different stakeholders in the fishery can hardly pack up and move to Washington DC to see the process through. So this is what happened.

First the North Pacific Fishery Management Council finally agreed to take up the issue after years of lobbying by native groups. So according to their required procedures that meant first publishing advance notice that they would take an initial look at the issue on a future meeting on X-date. The Council meets 5 times a year, three meetings in Anchorage, one annual meeting alternating between Seattle and Portland, and one elsewhere in Alaska (usually Kodiak Dutch Harbor, or Sitka).

At the first meeting that the Council decided to take up the issue they heard three days worth of public testimony from various native fishermen, commercial fishermen, sports fishermen, etc. First the Advisory Panel took testimony and formed recommendations for the Council. Then the Council took testimony. Then finally based on the Advisory Panels' recommendations and public testimony they devised a set of policy alternatives to be analyzed that looked into who would be eligible to participate, what various regulations they would fish under, how much halibut they would be allocated, and so forth. This is often the most political part of the process because what alternatives you decide to analyze pre-determine what decisions you make at the end of the process.

The job of conducting that analysis is then tasked to analysists at either the management branch of NMFS (of which I was one) or the analytical staff who worked for the Council. We worked together and divided up the work. That meant at least 6 months worth of work for some lead staff analyst with input from various others to put together a complete Environmental Analysis, Economic Analysis, and Regulatory Impact Review that is required by various laws passed by Congress such as NEPA the Regulatory Flexibility Act, the Administrative Procedures Act and others. You have to do a decent job which means often hundreds of pages of data analysis of fisheries data, economic data, environmental data, and so forth. If your analysis is inadequate than some attorney for one of the groups that opposes the proposal will likely find the flaw and sue and get a judge to stop the whole process until you do it right. There are also a limited number of agency staff and Council staff who can do these analyses so there are only so many issues that the Council can tackle every year. Staff time is often the limiting bottleneck in regulatory agencies.

Six months later when the analysis is finally done you present it at the next Council meeting. So the lead analysist gets up and does a powerpoint song and dance with lots of graphs and such to the Advisory Panel, and Scientific and Statistical Committee, answers lots of questions, sits through days more public comment on the analysis you just did, and then repeats the whole process later in the week to the full Council. At the end of that whole process the Council decides on a draft preferred alternative, comes up with a list of changes they want to see made based on public testimony, and sends it back to you for revisions and announces at what future meeting they will be making a final decision.

At a subsequent meeting you go through the whole process again, present the analysis with the preferred alternative, get lots of often contentious emotional testimony, sometimes have people marching outside in the street, demonstrating, etc. (really) and then the Council takes a final vote on their preferred policy approach which is then forwarded to NMFS as an amendment to the fishery management plan and proposed regulation.

At this point you now have a proposed idea that has finally landed on the desk of the NMFS usually over a year into the actual process. At that point a regulatory person at NMFS (me in this case) goes through the analysis, fine tunes it as necessary, and drafts up a set of proposed regulations which then gets sent up the chain of command to NMFS headquarters in Washington DC for final approval. Along the way you have to get legal review done by NOAA General Council, do consultations with native groups as required by law, and possibly consult with other agencies like the Coast Guard, Fish and Wildlife Service, and other branches in NMFS to make sure there are no effects on protected seabirds, tribal issues, effects on marine mammals, and so forth. If there is any government paperwork requirement in your proposed regulation it has to be cleared by OMB in Washington DC due to a Congressional Law called the Paperwork Reduction Act which requires that any new regulations that impose a paperwork burden on the public be reviewed and cleared by OMB. At each one of the steps in this process your regulatory package lands on someone's desk, say at OMB, where it is on top of a stack of other regulations to be reviewed from all different agencies and they get to yours when they can. Finally after all of that your proposed regulation gets published in the Federal Register with usually 60 days for public comment, but for complex regulations the comment period can be up to 180 days. Hopefully all of the agency review is fairly pro-forma because you have kept most of those people in the loop and many of them have participated in the process at the Council level. There is a NOAA General Counsel representative on the council itself so if there are legal issues she should have caught it before it made it to this stage.

For a complicated and controversial rule like this you will then likely hold a series of public meetings or hearings in native communities around the state so that people have a chance to testify without having to travel the long distance to Anchorage or Seattle. So I'm flying around Alaska visiting a variety of native villages, giving presentations and taking comments and discussion. Explaining what is proposed and how it would affect their community. Some times you spend several days in a remote community depending on flight schedules and weather and maybe have to sleep in the school or church if there is no hotel. So you pack a sleeping bag.

If there are complicated regulatory issues to work out the Council will often form an ad-hoc advisory committee of fishermen and and such to meet and provide input. Usually in Seattle where most of the fishing industry groups are based. So I fly down to Seattle for a series of long meetings with industry to work out regulatory details and such. Depending on what the specific issue is.

Eventually the comment period comes to an end and if it is a controversial rule you might have several hundred paper and email comments to go through which you must do one by one and summarize all of them. Comments can also be on the adequacy of your analytical documents which you might also have to revise. After you have summarized all the comments you set about drafting a final rule which you will probably flesh out through some meetings and conference calls with various higher level bosses if it is something controversial. Then you send your final rule package back up the chain through all the legal and required regulatory review once again until it finally lands on the desk of the head of NMFS for signature. Which might take another month or two or more. And then it finally goes to the Federal Register for publication and then after a required waiting period becomes law. And if it is some complicated program that requires permits and funding and new staff it might take another year to get all of that in place.

So basically you have spent 2-3 years of endless public process and review to get to the point where you have a new Federal regulation related to subsistence fishing of halibut in Alaska.

Can you streamline the process? Well yes, the agency does have the authority to bypass most of that bureaucratic process in the case of environmental or economic emergencies and publish an emergency rule. But by law those are only valid for 180 days and can only be renewed once for an additional 180 days. So you can't shortcut the process to do any permanent regulation.

Are all those bureaucratic steps necessary? Probably not. There is duplication and such. But they are all there in response to specific laws passed by Congress which only ever seems to add new laws and never remove old ones. Or in response to lawsuits that have set new precedents and added new procedures. So you really do end up with 2-3 years of endless process, nearly all of it required by law.

Is the public more involved or less involved through this agency process than if it had been written directly by Congress? I would argue that it is vastly more involved this way. The public has the opportunity to testify three separate times at the Council during the rulemaking process itself. Native communities had the chance to see the proposal and comment on it. And sometimes you have a series of additional public meetings to work out details. If it was a law proscribed by Congress there might be just one hearing in the House or Senate and then it will be bundled into some 1000 page omnibus spending bill and come out the other end tweaked in strange ways by a completely obtuse process by whatever industry big wig had the secret ear of some Senator. Because that is how most laws get passed by Congress.

Can we make it much more streamlined and efficient? Yes, of course. But at the expense of the public process and all the analysis and review required by law. And if you want regulations to move faster you often need more staff to make that happen as most agencies are severely understaffed. So that means more government not less.

Can this process be privatized? Sort of. You can hire consultants and consulting companies to do it. And that sometimes happens. But the only ones capable of doing that sort of work are ones that are largely made up of ex agency staffers and industry lawyers and that frankly costs MORE money rather than less because private consulting companies are expensive. And they still have to go through the whole process anyway. All they can really do is the complicated environmental and economic analyses. They can't legally do the actual rulemaking.

Are agencies just making arbitrary out-of-control regulations without public input, rhyme, or reason? Not in my experience. In fact, when someone important thinks that the agency has strayed too far afield they meet with their Senator over drinks, or write their Senator and you get a nasty letter from the Senate going to the Secretary of Commerce which makes its way down to your desk for a response. And sometimes your boss gets called to Congress to explain himself about something you worked on which means you get to fly out to Washington DC and brief the head of your agency and then tag along to a congressional hearing where you have to whisper in his ear when he gets a tough question. Not fun. Because often the questions are dumb and have no easy yes or no answer. And are often just grandstanding where they don't want a real answer. No one wants that. And it makes your boss extremely unhappy. So much of the legal review within the agency is to make absolutely sure that doesn't happen. The NOAA and Department of Commerce attorneys are reviewing your work to make sure their and your boss is never in that position. They go over every proposed regulation line by line with a fine tooth comb to make sure all is in order and entirely legal.

So yes, Justice Kagan is absolutely correct. Congress is absolutely not equipped to do this sort of work. And nor would it improve public access and input if it was Congress doing all of this in lieu of NMFS. In fact, just this one small issue would consume a year's worth of work for Senate Commerce Committee sub-committee on fisheries and oceans. And there are hundreds of fishing regulations being developed and worked on through the 8 different Councils and 5 regional management offices of NMFS scattered from Hawaii and the Samoan Islands to the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Maine.

So what happens instead is that Congress revisits the Magnuson-Stevens Act periodically every 5-10 years for a long process of reauthorization in which it examines the many different fisheries around the country, gets testimony from around the country, and considers whatever necessary changes are needed in the law or agency to move forward into the future. The really big picture stuff. Which is usually run by Senators and Congressmen from coastal states like Alaska, Washington, Maine, and Louisiana.

Sometimes a new administration comes into power and they put inexperienced political appointees into top positions and they start demanding all sorts of changes, new regulations, etc. in response to whatever sector of industry is whispering in their ear. And they get extremely frustrated when they can't just do what they want by executive order. Sometimes in the case of the Trump Administration they go ahead and issue arbitrary orders anyway, which ultimately get shot down by the courts or tossed out by the next incoming administration. So there really isn't a shortcut. And the administrative state is not really trying to obstruct political appointees. The reality is that the political appointees simply don't have the authority to do whatever they want by whatever process they want. There are many many laws that prevent that. But they still get very mad when the lawyers in the agency they control tell them "no, you really can't legally do that". Especially if it is a political appointee from the business world with no experience in government. Where arbitrary decisions can be made by CEOs all the time. The government really doesn't work like a business.

And of course if Ron DeSantis gets his way and the Commerce Department is abolished, all this goes away, replaced by I don't know what. Anarchy on the high seas like the fisheries off the coast of Somalia I guess. Where there are no fish left and so all the local fishermen are destitute and have turned to piracy.

[Jazman]

So what happens instead is that Congress revisits the Magnuson-Stevens Act periodically every 5-10 years for a long process of reauthorization in which it examines the many different fisheries around the country, gets testimony from around the country, and considers whatever necessary changes are needed in the law or agency to move forward into the future. The really big picture stuff. Which is usually run by Senators and Congressmen from coastal states like Alaska, Washington, Maine, and Louisiana.

Sometimes a new administration comes into power and they put inexperienced political appointees into top positions and they start demanding all sorts of changes, new regulations, etc. in response to whatever sector of industry is whispering in their ear. And they get extremely frustrated when they can't just do what they want by executive order. Sometimes in the case of the Trump Administration they go ahead and issue arbitrary orders anyway, which ultimately get shot down by the courts or tossed out by the next incoming administration. So there really isn't a shortcut. And the administrative state is not really trying to obstruct political appointees. The reality is that the political appointees simply don't have the authority to do whatever they want by whatever process they want. There are many many laws that prevent that. But they still get very mad when the lawyers in the agency they control tell them "no, you really can't legally do that". Especially if it is a political appointee from the business world with no experience in government. Where arbitrary decisions can be made by CEOs all the time. The government really doesn't work like a business.

Sounds like I / we should be thankful for the administrative state... a lot of things that we probably wouldn't like or that might adversely affect our communities, the brakes get pumped on and die in the administrative state. Can I say praise God for big gov?

[temporal1]

Sounds like I / we should be thankful for the administrative state... a lot of things that we probably wouldn't like or that might adversely affect our communities, the brakes get pumped on and die in the administrative state. Can I say praise God for big gov?

Praise as you will.
Every human entity, even churches, require oversight, accountability, vigilance, as described in scriptures. Sleeping is the problem.

[temporal1]

I don’t think DeSantis has a serious plan for governing (and yes I’m aware many conservatives love him).
He seems to just launch cheap sound bites that appeal to “conservative values” on the surface but with no real plan for how to actually get any of this done.

Of that we would agree.

Also agreed.

Agreed, if DeSantis is guilty as charged.

[barnhart]

I'm not sure how happy any of us would be with a government with no administrative state with it's by laws and unelected officials. That gives the system a lot of continuity and stability. Just imagine some politician or party you distrust the most coming into office with no checks on their power.

The spirit of the age right now is anger and tearing down. Be careful about giving in to it. Institutions cannot save but they can do some good. After the heat of tearing down has passed, we may discover what is next is not that great either.

[Ken]

So what happens instead is that Congress revisits the Magnuson-Stevens Act periodically every 5-10 years for a long process of reauthorization in which it examines the many different fisheries around the country, gets testimony from around the country, and considers whatever necessary changes are needed in the law or agency to move forward into the future. The really big picture stuff. Which is usually run by Senators and Congressmen from coastal states like Alaska, Washington, Maine, and Louisiana.

Sometimes a new administration comes into power and they put inexperienced political appointees into top positions and they start demanding all sorts of changes, new regulations, etc. in response to whatever sector of industry is whispering in their ear. And they get extremely frustrated when they can't just do what they want by executive order. Sometimes in the case of the Trump Administration they go ahead and issue arbitrary orders anyway, which ultimately get shot down by the courts or tossed out by the next incoming administration. So there really isn't a shortcut. And the administrative state is not really trying to obstruct political appointees. The reality is that the political appointees simply don't have the authority to do whatever they want by whatever process they want. There are many many laws that prevent that. But they still get very mad when the lawyers in the agency they control tell them "no, you really can't legally do that". Especially if it is a political appointee from the business world with no experience in government. Where arbitrary decisions can be made by CEOs all the time. The government really doesn't work like a business.

Sounds like I / we should be thankful for the administrative state... a lot of things that we probably wouldn't like or that might adversely affect our communities, the brakes get pumped on and die in the administrative state. Can I say praise God for big gov?

I don't know if you should be thankful. But I just wanted to paint a picture of how things really work. And that is just one small obscure agency. Yet it still does hundreds of regulations per year around the country from shrimp fishing in Louisiana to tuna fishing in the Western Pacific to menhaden fishing off the central Atlantic. Then you have many dozens of other agencies doing the same thing. All the immensely complex banking regulations by the Federal Reserve and FDIC, worker safety regulations by OSHA, food and drug safety regulations by the FDA, highway safety regulations by NTSA, air traffic and railroad regulations by DOT (think train wrecks of toxic chemicals like East Palestine Ohio), environmental regulations for air, water, and solid waste pollution by the EPA, labor regulations to govern things like minimum wage and overtime laws and collective bargaining, education regulations governing things like special education and non-discrimination, regulations governing the health insurance and healthcare industries, vaccine safety, etc. etc. etc.

All of them following similar processes of highly complex rulemaking, each doing things specifically authorized by law by Congress and funded by Congress. All of them doing similar processes of public involvement through public meetings and hearings, public committees that review regulations and make recommendations to regulators (such as the committees of scientists and medical experts that review drug and vaccine safety before they are approved). And all of them subject to furious lobbying by professional industry lobbyists who in reality spend more time lobbying the administrative state than they do Congress. But you cannot have a public comment period for something like a banking regulation and only have mom and pop citizens write in. You get hundreds or thousands of comments from banking lobbyists who are lawyers, you get astroturf campaigns ginned up by good government groups, and so forth. And you have former agency people going on to higher paying jobs in industry who's job it is to go back and lobby their old agency where they still know lots of people and have intimate knowledge of the process and where the actual inflection points are.

It would frankly be utterly impossible for Congress to do all of this. They most definitely lack the time, expertise, staff, and so forth to even tackle 1% of it. And the lawmaking process in Congress is far more arbitrary and difficult for ordinary people or industries to interact with. So it is entirely proper for Congress to do the big picture lawmaking and then delegate the day-to-day details to agencies.

Now can big government be reduced? Of course. But the intelligent way to do that is identify functions of government you want reduced. Or spending on specific programs you want cut. I could come up with many examples. Farm subsidies for big sugar, cotton, wheat, soybeans, corn production for example. That pay billions in subsidy checks to rich landowners to sit in their beachfront homes in Florida for soybean farms they own in Missouri. Or the federal flood insurance program that pays billions and billions to the owners of beachfront property that continually gets flooded on barrier islands in North Carolina or Texas. Or Medicare which pays hundreds of billions to drug companies for prescription medications but cannot by law negotiate or regulate pricing like every other government in the world does. But each of those things have powerful and wealthy constituencies behind them who lobby and fund congressional campaigns. And one Senator can bring the whole process to halt. So it is extremely difficult to tackle even just one of those things.

The dumb performative way to cut government is to say you want to cut the Department of Commerce or Department of Education (which largely manages student loans and enforces special education and non-discrimination regulations and plays no real role in curriculum. That is entirely the states). Or the Department of Energy which largely regulates the nuclear power industry. Does Ron DeSantis really want nuclear power plants to operate without government safety oversight? And for private power companies to be able to build new reactors wherever they want with no public process or regulatory process? Do you want a Chinese-owned private power company to build new nuclear power plants of unknown design in your back yard with no regulations or public process? Boom. It just starts going up overnight? With no one even inspecting it for safety much less involved in the decision about where to put it and how to deal with the nuclear waste? So that next time a train derails in East Palestine it is carrying high level nuclear waste with a million year half life> the Department of Energy regulates that. Ron DeSantis wants to eliminate it. The DOE also regulates the handling of nuclear materials so they don't fall into the hands of terrorists and so countries like Iran can't easily build nuclear weapons. Do we want stop doing all of that? Stop trying to keep ISIS from building a dirty bomb? Ron DeSantis wants to cut all that.

You also have Congress doing dumb things like shutdowns and spending freezes. I worked there through all the 90s through various shut downs by the Newt Gingrich Congress and various spending and hiring freezes. That just massively slows things down. A 2-week shutdown doesn't just stop things for 2 weeks. You come back with a huge back log of every other kind of work piling up. Previously scheduled public meetings of all kind need to be rescheduled, often months later because of flights, schedules, hotel and meeting site reservations and so forth. So a 2 week shut down can cause months of delay across the entire Federal government on things like regulations.

Another favorite tactic is blunt spending and hiring freezes. They were a favorite of Republicans in the 1990s. What happens is people are constantly retiring, quitting, moving on to other jobs, getting promoted, etc. So if you freeze government hiring it just means that offices grow increasingly empty which slows things further. That woman at OMB who must review the paperwork requirements of new government regulations? Her office is empty because she retired and so maybe that work has dropped on some other co-worker's lap who doesn't know how to do it and has a full slate of other duties. Because there is a hiring freeze and OMB can't hire someone to replace her. So all that stuff piles up and a month gets added to every regulation you write. Is that step necessary? Not really, but Congress mandated it years ago when they passed the Paperwork Reduction Act and you can't legally pass new regulations without it. That would be an agency actually overstepping its bounds.

Anyway, sure the government is riddled with all manner of inefficiencies. There is fraud, which is largely the public and business cheating on programs like Medicare. And there is wasteful spending, which all comes from Congress not agencies that do not control their own budgets. But it is the way that most democratic governments around the world actually work. You have administrative agencies doing all that regulatory work through complicated processes that are largely mandated and overseen by the legislative branch. In countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, and Russia you do have arbitrary autocrats acting without checks and balances. And they can do things faster for sure. But those aren't democracies.