Administrative state

Among its many innovations, The New Yorker turned the humble biographical sketch into “The Reporter at Large,” arresting prose that revealed what little-known people do and why their work matters. My own experience with the form began in high school English, where I profiled a bond-trading family friend under the headline “Buy Low, Sell High.” In Who Is Government?, Michael Lewis assembles a roster of celebrated authors to write profiles shining a light on obscure federal employees—advancing a simple thesis that these unsung officials are the backbone of America. At a time when President Donald Trump is determined to shrink the federal workforce, investigating how these officials work and the worth of what they do is a potentially valuable project. Unfortunately, while all but one of the profiles are informative and elegantly etched, the book contributes little to a fair assessment of the government employees’ overall performance. First, the sample is tiny: seven portraits, plus a cameo for government statistics in general. Such a small, hand-chosen selection cannot fully illuminate a mammoth bureaucracy that numbers in the millions. The administrative state has become so vast that it is almost impossible to evaluate through personal stories, however compelling. Second, the writers have chosen a very unrepresentative group. For instance, the substantial focus is on those who gather and disseminate information. One of these essays covers the information the government produces in general, like employment and inflation statistics. In another, we meet Pamela Wright, an employee of the National Archives who digitizes census information so it can be more easily used in the hinterlands, including her native Montana. A third profile, Heather Stone, who runs a clearing house for the FDA that catalogues off-label uses of drugs that may cure rare diseases. Information production is a classic public good. It is undersupplied by the market, because once published, the information is hard to restrict and thus profit from.  Yet the dissemination of such matters as price and wage statistics or information about drugs that help cure obscure diseases has obvious positive externalities. And not only are they valuable, they do not impose substantial costs on anyone, unlike government regulations, but just add pennies to our tax bills. What’s not to like? But even with seemingly unobjectionable government functions, the writers skate over difficult issues posed by the work their subjects do. For instance, the chapter about government statistics does not even mention the most substantial way that the government systematically misrepresents the state of our economy. Many economists think that the government understates growth, because it does not capture the accelerating technological improvements in goods; a cellular phone today may cost as much as one ten years ago, but its capabilities are far greater. And recently, economists have calculated that certain free goods, such as Facebook and other social media platforms, have also boosted real economic growth substantially, although they do not even show up in the statistics. This distortion matters: it creates an illusion of stagnation and feeds politicians’ claims that America is in relative decline from the boom post-WWII years. Maybe it is not an accident that government workers tend to statistically slight the accomplishments of the private sector, of which they are not a part. Many of the remaining jobs portrayed are somewhat eccentric. One chapter focuses on a team building a coronagraph, an instrument used in conjunction with a space-based telescope, such as the ones named for NASA executives James Webb or Nancy Grace Roman. The device blocks out the brighter light from nearby stars to reveal more distant and fainter stars and structures. This project, too, might be described as gathering information to advance basic science–the positive externalities of discovering new galaxies or exoplanets are less clear than curing disease or gauging the employment rate, but increasing such knowledge can be defended as a form of civic flourishing. If gathering information, studying the stars, and caring for veterans’ cemeteries was all or even most of what the government did, the administrative state would be far less controversial than it is. But here, too, the profile’s author, Dave Eggers, glides past the less flattering facts surrounding his chosen agency. NASA has been shrinking, because presidents of both parties have concluded that private enterprise does a better job of supplying the infrastructure for outer space exploration than the state. As Law & Liberty contributing editor G. Patrick Lynch has written before, SpaceX, a for-profit company created by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has revolutionized rocketry and has taken over the trips to our manned space stations. Eggers never mentions that it will be this private company that will launch the Roman Telescope into the heavens. Worse still, Eggers insists, “This work is paid for by you; no billionaire would bankroll it—there’s no profit in it,” a claim belied by the philanthropic billions already pouring into science and health services with no expectation of personal return. The most glowing write-up in the entire volume is that given to Ronald Waters, the principal deputy undersecretary for Memorial Affairs. That title is Washington-speak for tending to the burial and cemeteries of our nation’s veterans. It is an honorable calling, and Walters seems to be one of nature’s noblemen, but again, it is a very unusual kind of work in the vastness of American bureaucracy. And it has something in common with the other jobs described above: it steps on no one’s toes and is not much touched by ideological disputes. If gathering information, studying the stars, and caring for veterans’ cemeteries were all or even most of what the government did, the administrative state would be far less controversial than it is. But, of course, the administrative state does a lot more than that.  It generates thousands of ideologically controversial regulations with which citizens and companies must comply. No doubt some of this is necessary, but the challenging questions are how much and whether government employees are sufficiently sensitive to the fellow citizens who spin the wheels of commerce that pay their salaries. The book does not shed light on these issues. Oddly, the collection profiles only one government employee who works for a rulemaking agency, the Department of Labor. But that employee, Christopher Marks, also does not impose binding rules on industry. Instead, he worked out a formula for calculating how much support mine shafts needed for their roofs—a formula that mining companies may choose to use or not. Again, his work is best seen as information-generating. The argument for government provision is that coal companies might not have incentives to do this work themselves, because it may be hard to profit from. But this last point is controversial. As the writer Michael Lewis acknowledges, an economic historian has suggested that the real barrier to making roofs safer was the learning curve to use bolts to shore them up, and that the market naturally solved the problem over time, given that mining companies did not want expensive tunnel collapses any more than workers. Unfortunately, while Lewis has a skeptical attitude toward this theory, he does not provide any reason that it is not true. In a similar vein, Charles Murray has argued that the rate of accidents in the workplace declined at the same rate both before and after the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Greater wealth and more know-how, not government bureaucracy, reduced accidents.   The one worker who clearly encroaches on the activities of others is Jarood Koopman of the Internal Revenue Service. But he is a cyber sleuth who unearths financial fraud and schemes to evade taxes. The criminals he helps catch rightly deserve little sympathy, unlike legitimate businesses which bear much of the brunt of government regulation. All eight essays are superbly crafted and, like the best New Yorker profiles, provide the reader with a sense of what it would be like to be a colleague of these employees. The one exception is an essay by Kamau Bell, who writes about a paralegal who has just joined the Department of Justice’s antitrust division. The first problem is his choice of such a neophyte, which is hard to explain except that the paralegal is a goddaughter of his who hopes to be a social activist. Bell tells us almost nothing about what an antitrust paralegal actually does, substitutes first-name testimonials for evidence, and treats “fighting monopolies” as an unalloyed public good. Yet antitrust punishes only the abuse, not the mere possession of market power, and, as the Supreme Court reminds us, the prospect of monopoly profits is the spark that ignites innovation. By ignoring those trade-offs, Bell’s essay crystallizes the book’s larger defect: it invites us to cheer government in the abstract while averting our eyes from the hard arithmetic of costs, incentives, and unintended consequences that any serious accounting of the administrative state demands. All nine essays also share a glaring omission: none confront the algorithmic elephant now charging through the administrative state that is artificial intelligence. No force is better designed to displace some of the very callings these writers celebrate—statistical clerks, archival digitizers, and government paralegals—than machine learning systems already scraping data, structuring case files, and drafting legal summaries in milliseconds. The Department of Government Efficiency’s question in any audit is now brutally simple: can a stack of silicon outperform a bevy of GS-12s? By refusing to reckon with that prospect, the book reproduces bureaucracy’s oldest vice—looking backward rather than forward and downplaying the private innovation that has made America great.

President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency have made great headway in slashing regulations, but this work could be short-lived unless Congress makes these changes permanent.  For 40 years, the Chevron doctrine, also known as Chevron deference after a 1984 Supreme Court decision, has empowered the administrative state to extend the power of the federal government further and further over the lives of Americans. This made doing business in the United States extremely difficult and has cost our economy as a whole a fortune.   Regulatory costs skyrocketed under the Biden-Harris administration. In just four years, federal agencies reported that the cumulative total of the cost for individuals and businesses to comply with regulations under the administration added up to more than $1.8 trillion. Even more egregious, in 2024, federal agencies imposed almost 92 million hours of paperwork on the American people and added over 107,000 pages of rules to the Federal Register, according to the American Action Forum. There is no way to calculate how much 92 million hours of paperwork will cost American business owners and their customers —but I can assure you, it’s too much. The administrative state is out of control. Part of the reason can be traced back to the use of the Chevron doctrine. Fortunately, it was overturned in June of last year, but there is now 40 years of red tape to unravel.  The Chevron doctrine held for decades that if a federal regulation was challenged, federal courts should defer to the agency’s interpretation of the law the regulation was based on. The only checks on this doctrine were that the interpretation should be “reasonable” and that the question wasn’t directly addressed in the text of the law itself. Obviously, this opened the door to a flurry of issues. One presidential administration’s definition of “reasonable” differed vastly from another.  Since this case was decided in 1984, the power of the executive branch has grown exponentially, usurping the lawmaking role of Congress and the judicial discretion of the courts. Since these rulemaking agencies are under the executive branch, multiple presidents have used Chevron deference and other tactics to manipulate laws passed by Congress to serve their own political agenda. For example, President Joe Biden grossly overstepped his authority when he issued a “90-day pause,” which lasted for over 200 days, on the issuance of new firearm export licenses. The policy stonewalled license applications for months, devastating American business owners. The Biden-Harris administration also stretched agency authority beyond the limits to forgive massive amounts of student loan debt that it actually didn’t have the authority to forgive. It’s time to roll back this administrative tyranny.   For decades, Chevron deference significantly eroded the separation of powers among the three branches of government, undermining the checks and balances vital to our constitutional system. In an 1817 letter to John Adams, James Madison wrote, “The great question now to be decided … is, whether checks and balances sufficient for the purposes of order, justice, and the general good may not be created by a proper division and distribution of power among different bodies.” Our Founding Fathers believed that tyranny results from power residing in one place. That’s why they were intentional about separating it. However, Chevron deference allowed executive agencies to shape, execute, and adjudicate laws—creating an unhealthy level of concentrated power within the bureaucracy and the executive branch. Allowing federal agencies to act like lawmakers is exactly what our Founders attempted to avoid when they decentralized power.  One particularly heinous example of bureaucratic overreach was when the Biden-Harris administration attempted to radically expand the Waters of the United States rule. Under this expansion, the Environmental Protection Agency would have been given the power to override the property rights of Americans with ponds on their property or even ditches that collected rainwater. It would have prevented farmers from taking care of their own land, even regulating how close they could mow a patch of grass adjacent to a ditch. According to Steve May, a farmer in Humphreys County, Tennessee, “Farmers are stewards of the land and water. They want to see that it’s protected and conserved. Overregulation leads to unknowns that cripple farmers’ ability to plan.”  Steve Hargrove, a beef cattle producer in Benton County, agreed and told my office:  “My concern is that the government is going to try to take over not only the creeks, but the ponds on my farm, too. I’m concerned I won’t be allowed to keep these bodies of water clear. And if I’m forced by this rule to let these creeks and streams go wild, it will affect my land. It could cause drainage problems in the field. I could lose ground, and that affects my way of life.”  Had this Waters of the United States rule-change been enacted, it would have been the end to true property rights in America.  Under the rule of Chevron, the deck was always stacked against everyday Americans. Consider that agencies won 71% of all cases where their regulations were challenged—and 93.8% of ambiguous cases. This gave an unfair advantage to federal agencies and ensured that true congressional intent and the will of the American people didn’t stand a chance. Representative government is the cornerstone of our constitutional system, but when that accountability is missing, abuse follows.  Consider how the Biden-Harris administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives treated gun shop owners. Tactical Edge LLC, a veteran-run gun shop in my hometown of Clarksville, had its federal firearms license revoked for minor paperwork errors. Bobby James, one of Tactical Edge’s owners, told my office, “This was all politics. They’re closing down gun shops so Americans can’t get guns.” Tactical Edge filed an appeal with the ATF and lost. It spent $60,000 on lawyer’s fees. James said, “For small businesses, there is not enough money to compete with the budget of the federal government and the ATF’s numerous elite lawyers.” As a result, Tactical Edge was forced to lay off most of its employees, many of whom were veterans. Though the Trump administration has now rescinded Biden’s “Zero Tolerance Policy,” gun shops like Tactical Edge have yet to get their licenses back. As a result, Tactical Edge has lost 80% of its business.  These are just a few stories of how government overreach has impacted real Americans, but there are many more. To protect Americans and American businesses from government tyranny, I introduced the Sunset Chevron Act. This bill would force all executive agency actions that have been upheld by the courts because of Chevron deference to sunset—unless they were upheld by subsequent congressional action. Every agency would be required to compile a list of all such rules in chronological order of implementation. Then, in order of most recent to least recent, each agency would sunset a different rule every 30 days. This would right 40 years of executive overreach.  Our Founding Fathers believed that the executive branch should execute the law, the legislative branch should write the law, and the courts should interpret the law. This bill restores the separation of powers to our constitutional system.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Undoing Decades of Administrative State Tyranny appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump has taken aim at the rot in the federal bureaucracy, but he will continue to face an entrenched deep state because the rules protect it, warns a radio host who once helped President Ronald Reagan combat the bureaucracy. Americans may not know that radio host and author Hugh Hewitt once worked in the heart of the executive branch, serving as general counsel and deputy director at the Office of Personnel Management, the human resources department of the federal government. Hewitt praised Trump’s work, but he also laid out the gargantuan task ahead of the president and others who would attempt to reform the administrative state. “I just am very impressed with the first, now it’s 102 days,” Hewitt told The Daily Signal in an interview at the Job Creators Network’s Freedom Fighters Summit Friday. “President Trump is resolved not to have this stand in his way, so I think flooding the zone is a very conscious strategy to overwhelm” the bureaucracy, he explained. Hewitt laid out five reasons the deep state exists, and gave some hope that Trump would succeed in at least partly reforming it. 1. The Civil Service Reform Act Some Reagan veterans praised the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 as a tool to restrain the federal bureaucracy, but Hewitt described it as a “nightmare.” He noted that the law created the Office of Personnel Management, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Office of Special Counsel, among other entities: “It just like subdivides into a hydra and gets bigger and bigger and less and less effective.” The Civil Service Reform Act created systems that allow a president’s “political” appointees to oversee the ostensibly nonpolitical “career” bureaucrats. While the law aimed to make government more accountable to the people’s elected representatives, Hewitt suggested that it insulated the bureaucracy. 2. Deep State Unions Among other things, the act codified how unions could represent federal employees. Even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the architect of the New Deal expansion of the government, opposed federal government unions; but President John F. Kennedy first allowed them in 1962, and the Civil Service Reform Act established clear rules for them. “Their job is to protect their members,” Hewitt noted of the public sector unions. “They take their union dues, and I don’t blame them.” “I was a lawyer in the private sector,” he added. “Your job is to protect your client, if and you take your money from your union dues and you go off and you spend it on defending every single member of every single union to the Nth degree and make it miserable.” “So, it’s their job to throw sand in the gears … and they’re very good at it,” Hewitt added. “The only way to change that is to change the statute.” As I revealed in my book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” public sector unions helped the left-wing nonprofits that staffed and advised the Biden administration. Now, public sector unions are acting like a deep state, teaming up with those nonprofits to sue Trump and block his reforms. 3. Tenure in Place “The idea of ‘tenure in place’ is the worst thing that happened to the republic,” Hewitt argued. He noted that federal regulations “keep you in place [on the job] absent an extraordinary set of findings and a series of appeals to the Merit Systems Protection Board,” so it gets very hard to fire deep state bureaucrats. Heads of executive agencies “don’t want to waste their time on firing a [high-ranking bureaucrat] who has not done his or her job for 10 years,” he noted. “They’ll move them down the hallway. There are so many hallways full of people who don’t know how to do their jobs.” “Unless and until we can repeal [the Civil Service Reform Act], we will have a deadweight administrative state.” 4. Deep State ‘Burrowing In’ Hewitt also described the phenomenon of “burrowing in.” While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for positions within the government who serve at the pleasure of the president, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in career positions. Political appointees often apply to switch to “career” positions in order to stay in government permanently. “‘Burrowing’ is a term of art, and at the end of every administration, those who like the gig, you know, 35-hour work weeks and remote work forever … they convert from being a Schedule C or a Schedule A that’s been hired under a political authority to a career service GS-protected, and that’s called burrowing,” Hewitt explained. “It’s not supposed to happen,” he noted. “It happens in a Democratic administration like crazy, like Day One. They get there, they start to burrow in from their positions.” “They don’t have to do anything to frustrate an agenda,” Hewitt added. “So much of the failure to reform the federal government is the inertia of people who are not interested in changing their routine.” The bureaucrats don’t have to take direct action to undermine a president’s agenda; they just have to be slow in responding to new orders and use bureaucratic explanations to cover for their inaction. 5. Need for a Realignment Hewitt said “there’s no way” to make the government more accountable “until and unless you can fire people.” If anyone asks him, “What’s your magic reform?” Hewitt said his answer is, “Just allow every head of agency every year the ability to fire 1% of its workforce, no questions asked, for any reason.” “The idea of accountability will make the federal government spring to life,” he said. Hewitt said many attempts at political realignment—where certain elections illustrate a sea change in public opinion—become “stillborn” because the leaders elected during that alignment may go too far for Congress’ willingness for change. Yet Trump represents something new. “I think President Trump has consciously decided to go to the center to try and expand his majority,” he said. “And if that is the case, I’m the happiest person in the world because—absent realignment and a supermajority in the Senate—you really can’t get much done.” Hewitt noted that only “supermajorities in both houses” of Congress enables a president to “change the legislative timber of the country in ways both fundamental and enduring.” He suggested that if the Republican Congress can pass Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” in the budget reconciliation process and it helps the economy ahead of the 2026 midterms, Republicans may expand their majorities in Congress and Trump can root out the deep state. The post Hugh Hewitt Reveals the Policies That Allowed the Deep State to Emerge, and How to Fight It appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Left-leaning federal bureaucrats aim to oppose President Donald Trump from within the administrative state, and some Biden administration appointees have attempted to “burrow in” to the federal bureaucracy by switching from “political” to more permanent “career” positions. While presidents appoint more than 3,000 people for political positions, the federal government directly employs roughly 2.3 million people, most of whom serve in ostensibly nonpolitical, career positions. “The biggest challenge that every single new Cabinet secretary and their subordinates will face is the entrenched bureaucrat,” Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “Some of it is overt, and we saw an example of that with the FBI employee trying to coerce his subordinates to ‘dig in’ against the administration,” he noted, referencing an email FBI agent James Dennehy wrote in January shortly before his retirement. “What’s worse is the quiet insubordination,” Whitson warned. He said many bureaucrats will “slow policy,” simply ignoring the president’s orders. A recent poll found that a whopping 75% of Washington, D.C.-based federal employees making $75,000 or more per year who voted for Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris in November said they would not follow a lawful Trump order if they considered it bad policy. Furthermore, a recent Foundation for Government Accountability study found that Democrat employees outnumber Republican employees by a 2-to-1 margin across federal agencies. In the 2024 presidential election, 84% of the money that federal employees gave in political contributions went to Harris. Sean Higgins, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, also highlighted the threat of employees slow-walking the president’s agenda. “It’s easy to throw sand in the gears for something you don’t like, and that’s one of the reasons why things run so slowly in the government,” he told The Daily Signal. Higgins noted that while analysts are familiar with the problem, no comprehensive study has shown exactly how many political appointees “burrow in.” However, the Office of Personnel Management keeps a record of how many political appointees request—and receive—nonpolitical “career” placements. An Overview of the Data “OPM is committed to upholding merit system principles and preventing improper conversions from political to career positions,” McLaurine Pinover, an Office of Personnel Management spokeswoman, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “This year, we launched a new review process to strengthen oversight and improve transparency in how agencies allocate career-reserved SES [Senior Executive Service] positions in the federal civil service, and we are closely reviewing all previous political conversions.” “Our goal is to ensure all career appointments are based on merit,” she added. The Daily Signal analyzed the available records, finding that the period between Jan. 1, 2024, and Jan. 20, 2025, had the largest number of political appointees approved to “burrow in.” Forty political appointees had been approved for “career” positions during that roughly yearlong span, with 17 approved just between Oct. 1 and Jan. 20. The data includes yearly reports for non-presidential election years, and quarterly reports for presidential election years, with the final report for each presidential year lasting until the Jan. 20 inauguration of the new president. The data shows higher numbers of political-to-career position placements during the Biden administration than during the first Trump administration. Eleven political appointees burrowed in during 2023, 23 burrowed in during 2022, and 33 did so in 2021. This brings the Biden administration total to 107. During the election year-plus period Jan. 1, 2020, to Jan. 20, 2021 (Trump’s last year of his first term), 29 political appointees burrowed in. Seventeen did so in 2019, 7 in 2018, and 15 in 2017, yielding a Trump 45 administration total of 68. The archived reports do not go back as far as the beginning of 2016, but the period between Oct. 1, 2016, and Jan. 20, 2017, during the Obama administration shortly before Trump took office, had a rather low number—only 8 political appointees burrowed in. A few caveats: Some of the political appointees who appear in these reports had switched to career positions earlier than they appear in the Office of Personnel Management’s reports—the reports merely include dates that the switches were approved, and they often mark that a bureaucrat made the move before the office approved it. Due to these delays, Trump political appointees received approval during the Biden administration and Obama appointees appear in the lists during the Trump administration. Requests to burrow in are rarely denied, but it does happen, and when a request is denied or in process, the Office of Personnel Management withholds the name from the report. The Daily Signal combed through the report for Oct. 1, 2024, to Jan. 20, 2025, and a few names illustrate the phenomenon of President Joe Biden’s appointees burrowing in ahead of the Trump administration. Some of these political appointees applied to burrow in long before Trump’s election, but the Office of Personnel Management under Biden approved most of them after Trump’s victory. The final example comes from earlier in 2024, but illustrates a leftist ideological bent among some of the bureaucrats who burrowed in. Report on Political Appointees to Nonpolitical Permanent Positions – October 1, 2024 – January 20, 2025Download Kerry Doyle Kerry Doyle, a lawyer, worked for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security under Biden, according to her LinkedIn profile. She requested to move from DHS to the Justice Department, becoming an immigration judge. The Office of Personnel Management received the request on July 31 but processed it on Dec. 15. Doyle went from making $168,000 annually to $176,548. As an attorney at ICE and DHS, she would have represented the Biden administration amid policies that, critics say, allowed more than 9 million illegal aliens to enter the country. Doyle was about to be sworn in at the Chelmsford immigration court in Massachusetts but received an email from the Executive Office of Immigration Review in February, firing her, The Boston Globe reported. Prior to her service in the Biden administration, Doyle had served as managing attorney at Church World Service, one of the nonprofits that went on to receive federal funding to move immigrants across the country during the Biden administration. She also worked as a scheduler and legislative assistant for Rep. Bob Wise, D-W.Va. Margot Benedict Margot Benedict, who started as an attorney at the Justice Department in July 2021, rose to become senior counselor to Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2024, according to her LinkedIn profile. According to the law firm Morrison Foerster, which currently employs Benedict, she first received an offer for a career position in 2023. She became a trial attorney for counterintelligence and export control in January 2024 after the Office of Personnel Management approved the transfer on Nov. 17. Benedict had received $116,653 annually in her previous position, and she received a pay raise to $131,243 in the transfer to a career position. The Trump administration fired her in March. Before joining the Biden administration, Benedict had interned with the left-leaning National Women’s Law Center and served as a law clerk for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. She also worked for three years at Montgomery Foerster, where she returned after the Trump administration fired her. Elisa Santana Elisa Santana, who joined the U.S. Agency for International Development in August 2022, applied to switch to a career position at the Department of Commerce. The Office of Personnel Management received her request in September and approved it on Dec. 15. She went from making $104,604 annually to a salary of $106,382. Santana posted on LinkedIn that she lost her job last week. Before joining USAID, Santana worked for Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and before that, for Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas. Tara Boggaram Tara Boggaram, a director of strategy execution at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, asked to switch to a career position as project finance specialist at the same body. The Office of Personnel Management received the request in late October and approved it on Jan. 12. Boggaram took a pay cut, from $136,780 to $111,032. According to her LinkedIn profile, she still works at the International Development Finance Corporation. She previously worked as a field organizer for Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s failed 2018 U.S. Senate campaign. Ruirui Kuang Ruirui Kuang, an adviser to the International Development Finance Corporation board of directors, requested a career appointment at the same place. The Office of Personnel Management received on Nov. 7 and approved on Jan. 12 her transition to become managing director of pipeline management and execution. Like Boggaram, Kuang took a pay cut—from $145,617 annually to $125,133. Kuang previously worked in the Obama White House as an innovation specialist on the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team from February 2015 to August 2016. Susan Wang Susan Wang, a senior implementation adviser in the Biden White House Office of Management and Budget, requested a career position. The Office of Personnel Management received her request on Nov. 18 and approved her transition to attorney adviser in the DOJ’s office of legal counsel on Jan. 6. Wang took a hefty pay bump, from $62,500 to $104,604. According to her LinkedIn profile, Wang interned with then-Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in 2012, and served as digital chief of staff for the Biden Presidential Inaugural Committee. Megan Doherty The Office of Personnel Management received a request for Megan Doherty, a deputy assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, to switch to a career position on Nov. 21. On Jan. 12, the Office of Personnel Management approved her request to become vice president of programs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Doherty received a substantial raise in the transition, going from $126,370 annually to $200,000. On March 15, Trump signed an executive order calling for the elimination of several federal entities, including the Wilson Center. Mark Green, the center’s president and CEO, resigned on April 1, a day after the Department of Government Efficiency visited the center. Only five employees reportedly remain at the center, and it seems likely Doherty is one of them. According to her LinkedIn profile, Doherty spent seven years at the National Democratic Institute, an ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofit that admits to having a “loose affiliation with the Democratic Party” and has received more than $1 million from the Foundation for Open Society (part of the foundation network of Hungarian American billionaire George Soros now run by his son, Alex). She served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council as director for North Africa. Andrea Delgado-Fink Andrea Delgado-Fink’s name did not appear in the Oct. 1-Jan. 20 report, but earlier in the 2024 reports. Even so, she also illustrates the general trend of the previous seven names. Fink, who appears to still be serving as deputy regional forester at the Forest Service, switched from her political appointee role as chief of staff for natural resources and the environment for Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack in October. She received a pay bump from $112,980 to $131,243. Before joining the administration, Fink worked at the environmentalist group Earthjustice from 2012 to 2019. She joined the Biden-Harris transition team in November 2020 and joined the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council in March 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her “environmental justice” past suggests she may oppose Trump’s efforts to reverse Biden’s policies on climate change. A Pay Raise for Doing the Same Job? The Office of Personnel Management list included multiple political appointees who applied for career positions but did not receive official approval or denial before Jan. 20, the end of the Biden administration. It also included many approvals that the office did not receive until months or years after federal agencies had already processed them, which indicates that many more Biden political appointees may have “burrowed in” before Trump took office. In most cases, political appointees received a pay bump when switching to a career position. Higgins, the Competitive Enterprise Institute research fellow, noted that the pay may prove “motivation for people to burrow in this way.” “If you can get yourself $15 grand more a year while still essentially doing the same job, why wouldn’t you?” he asked. The post How Many Biden Appointees ‘Burrowed in’ to the Permanent Bureaucracy? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Trump administration has been waging war against unnecessary regulations enacted by previous Democrat presidents, and shower heads are the latest target. Former President Barack Obama’s administration issued a 13,000-word regulation defining “shower head.” President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing that regulation’s repeal. “Overregulation chokes the American economy and stifles personal freedom,” the order reads. “A small but meaningful example is the Obama-Biden war on showers: Twice in the last 12 years, those administrations promulgated multi-thousand-word regulations defining the word ‘showerhead.’” The order will “end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure and make America’s showers great again,” according to the White House. The Trump administration has also worked to reduce regulations on appliances like gas stoves, water heaters, washing machines, furnaces, and dishwashers. “We’re going to get rid of those restrictions,” Trump said. “You have many places where they have water, they have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. But people buy a house, they turn on the sink, and water barely comes out. They take a shower, water barely comes out. And it’s an unnecessary restriction.” The post Trump Cracks Down on Obama-Era 13,000-Word Regulation on Shower Heads appeared first on The Daily Signal.

PLEASE WATCH QUICKLY BEFORE IT IS TAKEN DOWN VIDEO – LIFE LIBERTY & LEVIN SUNDAY, MARCH 30, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip6mDBANk80 VICTOR DAVIS HANSON – THE TYRANNY OF THE LEFTIST JUDGES

Telos 210 (Spring 2025): Rethinking State Power is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats. Frustrating the hopes of cosmopolitans and globalists, state power is back. Rather than imagining a replacement of sovereignty with law, political debates now revolve around the particular forms that state sovereignty might take. Even Europe, long seeing itself as the place from which a new international legal order might expand its reach, is reinvesting in military power to protect its sovereignty from the threats posed by Russia, China, and, in some ways, the United States. Yet this realization about the continuing centrality of the state does not mean an abandonment of the moral imperatives and prejudices of the people. On the contrary, state power is being recognized as the instrument through which the people can exercise their will, even as the state places constraints on popular sovereignty. The essays in this issue of Telos consider the ways in which state power interacts with popular attitudes and social institutions in order to establish the basis for sovereignty and law. Continue reading →

Part of the Trump administration’s efforts to improve efficiency, accountability, and transparency in the federal government include minimizing the amount of taxpayer-funded time that federal employees spend working for their unions instead of doing the jobs they were hired to perform. This “paid union leave” is otherwise known as “official time.” A Feb. 27 memo from President Donald Trump’s Office of Personnel Management directs agencies to “authorize taxpayer-funded union time only in amounts that are reasonable, necessary, and in the public interest and to monitor its use to see that it is used efficiently.” It also requires agencies to resume tracking and reporting on the number of federal employees and the amount of time they spend working for their unions, as well as tracking and reporting other federal taxpayer subsidies provided to unions. This is not a new policy. Historically, both Democrat and Republican administrations tracked and published “official time” metrics, but the Biden administration removed the OPM webpage that contained those reports (the site now displays an error message) and told agencies they did not have to report official time. Nevertheless, a congressional oversight request provides some insight into official time under the Biden administration, including 1,030 employees at the Social Security Administration spending a total of 242,237 hours on official time at a cost to taxpayers of $15.1 million in fiscal year 2023. That included $1.43 million to pay 14 Social Security Administration employees who spent 100% of their time working for their union. While we don’t know how much total time and money federal employees are currently spending on official time, we can safely assume it is at least as much as the 3.6 million hours that nearly 2,000 federal employees spent on official time in 2016, which was at the last year of the Obama administration. At that rate, and accounting for average federal employee compensation of over $160,000 per year in 2024, official time is costing federal taxpayers at least $321 million per year. The Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the highest users of official time, even as a report from Sen. Jon Ernst, R-Iowa, found that “[t]housands of calls from veterans seeking mental health care go unanswered” in just one VA office alone. Reports of nurses at the VA spending 100% of their time working for their union instead of treating patients were an impetus to Trump’s executive order that prevented federal employees from spending more than 25% of their work hours working for their union. But the Biden administration reversed that order, removing all limits, and all reporting on official time. Some concerning information is likely to come out of agencies’ revived reports on official time. In addition to tracking the number of employees and their time, agencies also have to report on other taxpayer-provided subsidies to unions. That would include, for example, “a single Veterans Affairs facility allocate[ing] half of a hospital wing—over 5,000 square feet—largely for the use of the union president and officials” as exposed in a report from the Institute for the American Worker. The irony of federal employees’ excessive use of official time is that they can’t even bargain for the biggest things most unions bargain over—pay and benefits. And working predominantly in offices (or, prior to Trump’s executive order requiring federal employees to return to the office, in their homes) hardly poses a need for lengthy worker safety negotiations. That leaves official time to be predominantly spent defending poor performers and bad actors that agencies have disciplined or dismissed, and negotiating over tedious things like the height of cubicle panels; designated smoking areas on otherwise smoke-free campuses; and the right to wear spandex at work. Trump’s memorandum will restore accountability to official time, but Congress would need to act to end it entirely. The No Union Time on the Taxpayers’ Dime Act, introduced by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and then-Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., would end the practice of official time, thereby requiring federal union members to foot the bill for their own activities. The post What Trump Memo on Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Means for Federal Employee Unions appeared first on The Daily Signal.