The 108th Congress should:
- eliminate the Cabinet-level
Departments of Agriculture, Interior,
Transportation, 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.
A Future Congress should:
- abolish all 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
- 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."
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Next: The Cabinet Departments
E. Corwin, Constitutional Revolution, Ltd., 13 (1941).
Has the Constitution Been Suspended?
-- The Rise of the "Administrative State"
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