INEZ STEPMAN: Administrative State Delenda Est.

With the election of Donald Trump and Republican majorities in the House and Senate, there is no single issue in a more desperate need of addressing than the out-of-control administrative state.

While taxes and healthcare are perennial policy battles, the so-called “fourth branch” is in many ways responsible for the “rigged game” that many conservative voters are tired of losing. When Democrats are in power, government grows; when Republicans are, it continues to do so at a slightly decelerated pace.

Until Congress and the president take concrete steps to rein in the bureaucrats who stay in office regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, they are at best playing for temporary stakes.

While the Congressional Review Act and the proposed REINS Act are good methods to put legislative power back with Congress, more is needed to control the fourth branch of government from within. The permanent, unaccountable elite that Trump often rails against can find no better symbol than the nearly three million federal government employees who are virtually guaranteed jobs for life. . . .

Around 90 percent of all federal government jobs now have civil service protections, a far cry from the mere handful of protected jobs when the law first passed. And “burrowing,” whereby political appointees secure protected civil service jobs after the president who appointed them leaves office, has become a common practice. Many of the top-level, career-protected bureaucrats in important agencies today were Obama political appointees during the last administration.

With 95 percent—99 percent in the State Department—of political donations from federal employees going to the Democratic Party, it’s hard to say spoils haven’t survived. Instead of the detached, apolitical bureaucracy that turn-of-the-century Progressives imagined, there now exists a permanent class of bureaucrats with almost limitless power over the lives of Americans.

We need dramatic reform, both in the civil service and with regard to regulation.