Congressional Issues 2008
THE BURGEONING BUREAUCRACY
Bureaucracies Galore!

• keep the promises made by the Republican Party in 1996
• eliminate the Cabinet-level Departments of Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, Labor, and Veterans Affairs;
• close down major independent agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Small Business Administration, the Corporation for National and Community Service, the Legal Services Corporation, and the Appalachian Regional Commission; and
• terminate obscure independent agencies like the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the Japan–United States Friendship Commission, the Marine Mammal Commission, America’s Education Goals Panel, the State Justice Institute, and the United States Institute of Peace.

• abolish all remaining bureaucracies

Coming out of the Convention Hall, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the delegates had hammered out for America. He is said to have replied, "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."

We have not kept it.

We have replaced a Constitutional Republic with "the Administrative State," a form of government which Madison, as he wrote in The Federalist, would have called “the very essence of tyranny.”* The size of government is as unconstitutional as it is incomprehensible.

These agencies do not manufacture goods which consumers would buy. With few exceptions, they do not provide services which consumers would pay for voluntarily. Those agencies that provide valuable services provide them inefficiently, and privatizing these agencies would increase competition, increase the variety and scope of services, give consumers more options, and provide better services at a lower cost.

Here is a list of many influential federal agencies, departments, boards and commissions. Here is a shorter list. These can be broken down into the following areas:

The Cabinet Departments

Major Independent Agencies

Obscure Independent Agencies

Then there are also "Non-Governmental Agencies"

Kevin Craig believes they should all be abolished.

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Federal bureaucracy thickening, study finds (7/22/04)

"Despite the president's promise to bring businesslike thinking to the federal government, the Bush administration has overseen, or at the very least permitted, a significant expansion in the both the height and width of the federal hierarchy," said Paul Light, director of the Center for Public Service at Brookings and a professor at New York University. "There have never been more layers at the top of government, nor more occupants at each layer."
Read full story

* Quoted in A. Gulas, The American Administrative State: The New Leviathan, 28 DUQUESNE L REV. 489, 490 (1990). (With Madison's warning ringing in his ears, Gulas nevertheless supports the "New Leviathan.") See also Peter B. McCutchen, Mistakes, Precedent, and the Rise of the Administrative State: Toward a Constitutional Theory of the Second Best, 80 CORNELL L. REV. 1 (1994). The great constitutional scholar E. S. Corwin was

told that Professor Powell of Harvard carefully warns his class in Constitutional Law each year against reading the Constitution, holding that to do so would be apt to “confuse their minds.” Certain it is that of the 6,000-odd words of the constitutional document, at least 39 out of every 40 are totally irrelevant to the vast majority, as well as to the most important, of the problems which the Court handles each term in the field of constitutional interpretation.

Has the Constitution Been Suspended? -- The Rise of the "Administrative State"

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