Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

DAVID BOSSIE: Trump, Musk Are Sticking It To Administrative State Right Out Of The Gate

(Screen Capture/CSPAN)

It was President Ronald Reagan who famously said, “as government expands, liberty contracts.”

Like with so many other things, Reagan was ahead of his time with this commonsense observation. A vast unchecked bureaucracy is indeed a direct assault on individual liberty — and tens of millions of Americans are adversely affected by it each and every day.

However, with the election of President Donald J. Trump and the formation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), that unfamiliar sound you’re hearing is liberty expanding.

As President Trump and DOGE Chief Elon Musk make their unprecedented push to target reckless government spending and overreach, the radical left and entrenched Washington establishment are hyperventilating over the realization that their decades-long ride on the gravy train is coming to an end. Don’t be distracted by the manufactured hysteria coming from liberal Democrats and their allies in the biased media; this is what “good government” looks like!

DOGE is simply taking common sense steps that any struggling business would have initiated years ago. For starters, Musk and his team went to the Treasury Department to examine exactly how the federal government goes about disbursing trillions in taxpayer dollars on an annual basis.

The fact that the U.S. government made nearly $250 billion in improper payments in one year alone should be a national emergency.

Trump and Musk — successful businessmen — are in the process of finding out what in the world is going on with our nation’s out of control finances and are hellbent on fixing the problems before it’s too late. It goes without saying that our Founding Fathers, who railed extensively about the threats posed by an out-of-control executive branch, would be mortified at what’s been allowed to transpire in our beloved Constitutional Republic in recent years.

It took our country 211 years, from President George Washington in 1789 to President Bill Clinton in 2000, to accumulate a $5 trillion national debt. DOGE is doing the hard work of investigating how it took America just 24 years to tack on an additional $31 trillion in debt. No department or agency is being spared and rightly so.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is being audited for its inappropriate spending of taxpayer funds on DEI projects that have nothing to do with our national security or helping poor people around the globe. Spending millions on DEI programs in Serbia, LGBT activism in Guatemala, a transgender opera in Columbia, and woke comic books and musicals amounts to stealing from hardworking American taxpayers.

It’s clear that USAID has been running amok for far too long; shutting it down or allowing the State Department to absorb the agency is long overdue and would be a fantastic way to shrink the size and scope of our horribly bloated federal government.

Similarly, thanks to President Trump and DOGE, the American people are about to find out how the U.S. Department of Education manages to spend hundreds of billions of dollars year after year, yet our children continue to fall further and further behind.

As Donald Trump has stated repeatedly, it’s time to try something different.

“We spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, and we’re ranked at the bottom of the list,” the president recently said, “and what I want to do is let the states run schools.” There’s no doubt that the United States is in dire need of a massive overhaul of our education system and if abolishing the Department of Education is the best way to accomplish the mission, President Trump should do so in the name of national security.

Afterall, there’s virtually nothing more vital to the security of our country than making sure future generations are willing and able to compete with Communist China across the board.

The Trump administration’s herculean efforts to challenge the broken status quo in Washington has career Democrat politicians on Capitol Hill losing their minds. The left’s superstructure – the mainstream media, federal bureaucracy, NGOs, teacher unions, coastal elites and academia — once thought to be ironclad, is finally being confronted and exposed for its failures.

The fits of delirium coming from defenders of the decaying liberal establishment aren’t surprising; entrenched power doesn’t like the feeling of long overdue reform.

Unelected bureaucrats are filing desperate lawsuits; “artificial turf” protests are being staged; and President Trump’s completely responsible moves to reign in careless spending and government waste are being falsely attacked as unconstitutional. This is the left’s same old tired playbook, and all it means is that Trump is making headway.

But God knows, when you’re a nation drowning in $36 trillion of debt, there’s still a long way to go to wrestle back control of government to the American people. For the departments and agencies President Trump doesn’t want to close, he should consider consolidating several into one of the mostly empty office buildings to save taxpayer dollars.

For example, the Labor, Housing, and Small Business departments and scores of other subagencies don’t need their own individual buildings in order to function. Obsolete buildings could then in turn be sold off to save additional funds.

Through it all, one thing is for certain — President Trump will not relent in his mission to save America.

It’s refreshing to say the least that we have a leader willing to stop kicking the can down the road and finally fix our big problems — many of which have been caused by a government that no longer cares what the people think — until now.

David Bossie is the president of Citizens United and served as a senior adviser to the Trump-Pence 2020 campaign. In 2016, Bossie served as deputy campaign manager for Donald J. Trump for President and deputy executive director for the Trump-Pence Transition Team.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.