The End of the Bureaucracy

Executive power turned against itself.

I have said it for decades.

Democrats have spent my adult life and longer building all of these executive government agencies that run the Federal government and give it ever-increasing amounts of power. They did it to gradually take elected power away from the people and drift us slowly into the slippery slope of a powerful central government that they control. Congress created these mini-authoritarian governments, granted them the power to manage various parts of our lives, gave us (or someone else) money so that we allowed them to exist, increased their budget and staff every year so that they grew, and set up the President to delegate control over each of them with an appointee picked by him and “approved” by Congress.

I’ve warned that in piling all this power on the Federal government, they were creating a monster they might not always like. Power shifts back and forth in our peculiar two-party application of a three-branch system of government, creating a bipolar mix of Democrats and Republicans elected to govern the Legislative, the Executive, and the Judiciary.

Everyone has laughed at the budget hawks for the last twenty or thirty years as the deficit flew out of control. In the past ten years, they’ve laughed at religious Conservatives, calling them backward and dangerous as they suppressed their freedom of speech indirectly through puppeteering big tech. In the past eight years, they’ve used various forms of banana-republic-style lawfare in an attempt to crush an already famous and wealthy Real estate Investor and media insider as he led a populist uprising against them.

Now, thanks to four years of criminal incompetence and executive overreach, too many of what the Democrats would consider the wrong people have taken over the whole thing. They created a monster to crush their political adversaries, and their political adversaries have taken control of it.

Donald Trump spent four years in office fighting an uphill battle against the Federal Bureaucracy. When he took office, he knew it existed and promised to “Drain the Swamp,” but he didn’t know just how powerful and dangerous the monster had become. The swamp fought back and kept him busy defending himself for four years. Then, the damage it did to his presidency, combined with a pandemic and resulting economic recession, resulted in a lost second term. Trump and his allies then had four years to boil on the sidelines, and map the swamp, and begin chiseling away at it from the outside.

The wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, a former Califonia Democrat who grew up in the fascist state of apartheid South Africa and knew from that what oppression looked like, shifted sides and went for the media’s throat. He saw that big tech was taking over the information sphere, disrupting the traditional TV, Radio, and Newspaper media to create a New Media with direct access to the people and that the bureaucracy and “woke mind virus” had taken over big tech. After complaining about it for a while, he put his money where his mouth was and bought Twitter—freeing it from the Leftist censorship that had taken it over in the name of “safety” and that had also fallen under the heel of the too-powerful bureaucracy. After pulling the plug on it, he released it’s records for all to see.

Then, all of this came together in 2024, resulting in Donald Trump's reelection. After his first four years as a Washington outsider President, he is now President again as a Washington insider who understands how much power the President can have over the monster if he puts the right people in control of it.

The gig is up. Many of Trump’s appointees to the various powerful federal government sub-levels have made careers out of criticizing those departments. Even with its razor-thin GOP majority, the Senate appears poised to confirm every one of them. Elon uses Twitter, now renamed X (I still hate that name), the same way that Ronald Reagan used his “Fireside Chats" to bring issues to the people, who then share their opinions with Congress. Elon isn’t always right, but he’s built X’s Community Notes to have a power and direction of its own that even disagrees with him from time to time.

Trump doesn’t have the power to directly remove funding that Congress has granted these agencies, but he can depopulate them. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have agreed that the corrupt, dark-money generating USAid will fall first. In his role as the head of the executive-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk has no real power. He reports to the congressionally empowered Office of Management and Budget. Trump does not yet have his new Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought (one of the authors of Project 2025), confirmed by the Senate, so he is doing that job. That means that Trump uses his Presidential power, either directly or through his appointees, to remove barriers so Elon and his people can access internal records on bureaucracies. Elon finds stuff in those records that he doesn’t like and shows it to Trump. Then Trump fires people or puts them on “administrative leave”. Trump cannot undo the power that Congress gave these agencies, but the mandate that Congress gave those agencies is, for the most part, somewhat vague anyway and subject to interpretation. “Subject to interpretation” means that if people disagree with Trump cutting any of the strings within these agencies, they have to fight him in court, which takes years.

So Trump hands Elon the threads. Elon sorts through them and shows Trump which ones to consider cutting. Trump and his lawyers then pick which ones to cut and cut them.

As the Democrats scream.

Credit for the great images above go to Substack’s and X’s AIs.