Washington, D.C., and the nation as a whole are in the midst of a combative chaos. On the one side is President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. On the other side is a large array of politicians, bureaucrats and special-interest groups opposing them. With the establishment of DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) and Trump’s appointment of Musk as its chief, the Administration has declared war on waste, fraud, and abuse within the halls and on spending accounts of the entire federal bureaucracy. Beginning with USAID, and now into a growing number of other departments and agencies, the technical and accounting nerds working under Musk have been unraveling tens of billions, perhaps even hundreds of billions of tax dollars, that have either been used for a wide variety of dubious purposes and ideological causes, or, seemingly, just “disappeared” with little or no paper trails telling where the money went, to whom, and for what activities.
On that other side are the politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups up in arms that Trump and Musk have declared war on the neediest, the poorest, the weakest, and the most deserving at home and abroad, whose physical and mental well beings are being threatened by a slash-and-burn campaign of cutting government spending and firing those who are the dedicated federal employees who serve the nation and the “needs” of so many of the deserving in American society. No matter how questionable or apparently “weird” some of the government’s spendings may be, the president’s opponents are taking an ideological “stand your ground” position of not one step back in allowing or supporting even a penny’s cut in government spending or the removal of even one questionable federal employee.
Trump, Musk, and company insist that they are simply trying to cut off the decades of unnecessary and corrupted “fat” out of the trillions of dollars of federal spending. The goal is to make government run on a more basic business-like standard of accounting for monies collected and monies spent to assure that the people’s hard-earned tax dollars go to where they legally and reasonably should go, based on properly collected taxes and properly legislated expenditures. The waste, fraud, and abuse has created layers of unnecessary and redundant federal employees who are part of the problem, and who should be let go, so that the remaining streamlined body of federal employees will be able to do their jobs.
For the anti-Trump cohort, even to question or challenge the levels, types, and purposes for which government expenditures are presently being undertaken is declared to be an attack on “democracy,” on “ordinary Americans,” who need government’s support and helping hand, on the “working people” of America, and on the social and economic disadvantaged whose very existence and dignity is threatened by Trump’s campaign of serving “the rich” and the corporate powerful at the expense of everyone else in the world. If there are any suspected small corners where tax dollar savings might be discoverable, we’ll send a report to Congress for investigation and decision-making (where, of course, it would die since those who have their hands in the taxpayer cookie jar are not interested in giving up even one of the cookies they wish to plunder).
At the same time, Trump insists that he has the presidential authority to do almost anything he wants in assigning tasks to DOGE through executive power, while his opponents declare that he is undermining the constitutional divisions of power between the three branches of government. Roles have been amusingly reversed. Republicans who very often warned of concentrated presidential power since the New Deal Days of Franklin Roosevelt, now hail Trump taking blotted government by the horns to bring the bureaucracy under control without congressional partnership or concurrence. The Democrats who have always praised or at least acquiesced in the growth of the “imperial presidency” as long as it was for causes, spendings, and programs they supported, now suddenly are concerned with presidential overreach when the occupant in the White House is the person they love to hate.
The most fundamental question is not being asked in all of this. A question that Republicans and conservatives have, seemingly, lost sight of and are frightened even to raise in public. It is a question that Democrats and all the others on the “progressive left” don’t even consider a question reasonably to ask.
It’s the question that lies behind the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. What are the legitimate functions of government, beyond which, political power would be illegitimately encroaching upon the liberty of the people in society? Seemingly, if Musk and company were able to dig out all the possible waste, fraud, and abuse that envelopes all the government departments, bureaus, and agencies, what would remain are the monies and staff in each of these departments, bureaus, and agencies that had their legitimate and desirable duties and responsibilities. (Yes, Trump has questioned the rationale and need for the Department of Education, but if push came to shove, it remains to be seen whether he would use up presidential power to push Congress for the abolition of the Education Department or even whether a majority of Republicans would vote for the department’s demise.)
For the Democrats and their allies to “the left,” since the days of Woodrow Wilson, who ridiculed the idea of constitutional limits on government in general and presidential power in particular, there are no limits to the size and scope of government. Every presumed social and economic problem needs and requires an enlargement of government to solve it. The only limit would be when there did not remain one corner, one activity, one human interaction in all of society not under the regulatory, redistributive, and planning hands of those in political authority. In other words, the only outer limit to governmental reach would be when all of human life, in all its aspects, was under the paternalistic control of government. That is, a fully socialist and collectivist society, regardless of the name and label under which it came to power and ruled.
The Founding Fathers, in the country’s two founding documents, made it fairly clear that there were definable limits to government. The Declaration of Independence stated that every human being is endowed with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The words and spirit of much else that those Founding Fathers wrote and said also made it clear that the right to private property and its peaceful use by their owners was also part of those inalienable rights. If the list of grievances against the British government in the remainder of the Declaration is carefully read, it is also clear that they considered the peaceful and voluntary production and exchange of goods and services also to be elements of those essential human rights. The colonists protested against the regulatory and interventionist controls, restrictions, and prohibitions the King of England had imposed on their economic affairs.
The Constitution was meant to be the institutional bulwark to assure that the new government in America was restrained from such overreaches as the British government was considered guilty of. The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, was meant to reinforce that clear understanding of what the American government was prevented from doing in terms of limits and restrictions on political encroachments on the freedom of each and every individual American.
Democrats and “the left” reject the original purpose and intent of the U.S. Constitution precisely because such limits prevent the extending of governmental power at the expense of the individual’s liberty. Thus, they usually ridicule and reject notions of “original intent” — of strict constitutionalism — as out-of-date ideas and concepts unfit for “modern times” with their own changing historical problems. That is why they insist that the Constitution has to be considered a “living document” that needs to be interpreted anew and changed with the times.
Republicans, on the other hand, fall into two camps that usually overlap. First, there are those who may believe that government should be reduced and cut down to a size more in keeping with the spirit and letter of the original Constitution. But they are persuaded that to publicly declare and work for such an institutional change is “political suicide.” Americans no longer understand or want such a far more limited government, regardless of the 4th of July rhetoric and occasional references to the “vision” of the Founding Fathers. Hence, to get elected and then stay in office, such a radical reduction in the size and scope of government never must be pushed for directly or on the campaign trail.
Second, many, if not most, of these Republicans do not want such a radical transformation in what government does. A good number, I believe, no longer even understand the founding idea and ideal upon which the country was established. They have been born, educated, and live in the modern interventionist-welfare state. They, like many other Americans, just take it for granted. They just want it to be managed a bit less expensively, and in a way that is more “business friendly” compared to their Democratic colleagues who never met a private enterprise they did not dislike.
Both the Democrats and Republicans are all part of the Washington, D.C., establishment. They just have different priorities, serve an array different (though sometimes overlapping) of special-interest groups, and have a common “will to power” that drives them for political office.
The country is still a long way off to the needed and necessary change in the climate of ideas in which real and truly radical institutional change would be called for and possible of being implemented for a society of individual liberty, free markets, free trade, and constitutionally very limited government. What the early weeks of the Trump administration, however, demonstrates is that conservatives and Republicans in the Donald Trump mold are not ready or capable of leading such a return to an America of liberty. The cow-towing of many free-trade Republicans and conservatives to Trump’s drive for neo-Mercantilist protectionism and planning through fiscal manipulation shows how lost they are in terms of understanding and defending a really free America.
The aggressive, emotional, and irrational response of the Democrats and their allies on “the left” to Trump’s DOGE campaign shows just how violent and resistant those who permanently eat and drink at the government trough really would be if a classical liberal or libertarian were to be elected to the presidency and undertook a principled, determined and consist campaign to abolish and repeal the interventionist-welfare state and the warfare state, root and branch.
It would be the intellectual, ideological, and political war of the century as defenders of liberty took on the dug-in political paternalists and plunderers determined to have the government means to regulate, redistribute, and plan the lives and incomes of everyone else in society. The current political battles are merely a prelude to what will come when the campaign slogan someday becomes Frederic Bastiat’s cry for “The End to All Legalized Plunder.”
