Free Republic

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the completion of the first year of Trump's second term as president, the number of federal employees has declined by 271,000. "We campaigned on cutting back the bloated bureaucracy and we have made considerable progress," Trump boasted. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) disagreed, saying "this isn't something I would be bragging about. More than 200,000 folks have lost the financial security that only government employment can offer. Just think about it. These folks have been cast out of the warmth of the collective and into the frigid private sector where competition...

US ambassadors have taken a chainsaw to the United Nations budget as part of President Trump’s mandate to have the world organization “get back to basics.” US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz and Management and Reform Ambassador Jeffrey Bartos told The Post they helped reduce the entire UN budget by $570 million — and America’s portion of that payment to the international governing body by around $126 million. “The UN has agreed to the first real budget cuts – actual real cuts for the first time in modern history, pretty much since the founding of the organization,” Waltz recently...

During college, one of my professors in Political Philosophy said that the only real revolutions in modern Western civilization were the French and the Russian. He was right, but I didn’t quite get it at the time. I do now. While the American Revolution was ostensibly a revolution, in reality, it was more of a divorce where the kids kept the same parents, they just lived with their Mom. Their Dad was still their Dad, but they didn’t have much to do with him. In contrast, the French and Russian revolutions were basically the children taking their parents out back...

President Trump’s deregulation effort has already delivered permitting reform.Today, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) took the final administrative action to complete one of the Trump Administration’s most significant deregulatory efforts, affirming the removal of CEQ’s National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing regulations. CEQ rescinded these regulations last year; this final rule reaffirms that rescission and responds to comments received on the initial action. This final rule is now available for public inspection here, ahead of its forthcoming official publication in the Federal Register.On February 25, 2025, CEQ published an Interim Final Rule (IFR), which went into effect on April...

As part of its celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence, the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life has published my Provocation, “Government by the Unelected: How it Happened, and How it Might be Tamed.” This full-length essay seeks to assess how the Founders’ principles have fared after 250 years. I argue that government by the consent of the governed has gradually diminished—especially in the 20th and 21st centuries—and has been substantially replaced by the government of a permanent, unelected, and allegedly expert class. The fuller work traces the history of this development, pointing both to...

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, introduced legislation that would compel the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to create a public directory of federal government employees, including their salaries, job descriptions and other details. [A] fiscal watchdog group also found that the names of 383,000 federal workers from 56 different agencies were redacted, amounting to a total of $38.3 billion in pay. "Like a twisted game of reverse Secret Santa, taxpayers are gifting paychecks to bureaucrats who remain anonymous." "The American people should not be forced to play ‘Where’s Waldo’ when it comes to figuring out where federal workers are...

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES — Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch dismantled a lawyer’s illogical arguments about a president’s executive power during a high-stakes Supreme Court hearing on Monday. The moment came during oral arguments for Trump v. Slaughter, a case centered around President Trump’s firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat member of the Federal Trade Commission. As The Federalist previously reported, the high court will weigh the constitutionality of statutory limitations on a president’s ability to remove members of so-called “independent agencies” and whether to overturn longstanding precedent established in its 1935 Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. decision. During his...

More than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S. this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law.An Associated Press investigation found that the wave of legislation has cropped up in most states, pushed by people with close ties to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The effort would strip away protections that have been built over a century and are integral to American lives and society. Around 30 bills have been enacted...

The Supreme Court just handed Trump the nuclear key: the authority to fire entrenched Deep State agents embedded across federal agencies. For the first time in 90 years, the President can dismantle the bureaucratic dictatorship that’s hijacked our Republic. FOR 90 YEARS, THE PRESIDENCY WAS A PRISON.. Since 1935, unelected operatives hid inside “independent” agencies like the FTC, SEC, and CPSC. These ideological soldiers wrote regulations like laws. Enforced them like tyrants. And they couldn’t be fired—not even by the President. Until now. THE COURT SWINGS THE HAMMER – TRUMP TAKES THE SWORD.. In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court...

A hallmark of President Donald Trump’s second term is that he’s not just promoting his own policies — he’s looking to shake up the American power structure from top to bottom. Step by step, he is undermining or destroying the left’s decades-old program to achieve total dominance of government and politics through its control of money and institutions. That’s what Trump is up to with his plan to move much of the federal bureaucracy out of the Washington, DC, area and into the rest of the country. In doing so, he’s infuriating federal bureaucrats leading cushy lives in DC and...

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court gave the green light for his administration to slash nearly a third of the Department of Education’s workforce. It’s a big (and long overdue) step toward reining in decades of federal overreach that’s taken power away from parents and local communities. ...... Now, thanks to the Supreme Court, the door is open to real reform. Congress has the power to finish the job and eliminate the DOE for good. These layoffs are just the first move toward dismantling a department that has prioritized politics over education for far too long. For years, bureaucrats in...

In 1883, when the Pendleton Act was passed, creating the US civil service, it must have seemed like no big deal. The forgotten Chester A. Arthur was the president. The fear of being assassinated like his predecessor James Garfield convinced him to back the legislation. The case for passage: government needs professionals with institutional knowledge. Technicians were changing the world, so why not government too? Science and engineering were the rage – electricity, steel bridges, telegraphic communications, internal combustion, photography – so surely public affairs needed the same level of expertise. Who could deny that civil service could do a...

The Department of Transportation is taking action to expedite permitting for infrastructure projects nationwide, minimize delays, and clear the backlog of projects awaiting federal approval, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. The agency has historically had some of slowest permitting timelines across the federal government. According to government data, the Federal Highway Administration and Federal Aviation Administration each take more than seven years to complete reviews while the Federal Railroad Administration and Federal Transit Administration each take more than five years to approve projects. At the same time, the average age of America's bridges is 47 years, meaning a bulk...

California can’t build housing or railroads on time or on budget—and thanks to a bloated, value-driven bureaucracy, neither can the rest of America. Just over two months ago, the Rand Corporation released a study on the cost of producing multi-family housing in three states: California, Colorado, and Texas. The results were paradoxically shocking, yet utterly predictable. California, it turns out, is a ridiculous place, run by ridiculous people, with ridiculous regulations. Or, as the folks at Rand put it, “The average market-rate apartment in California is roughly two and a half times the cost of a similar apartment constructed in...

Michael “Mike” Nedd, a 30-year veteran of the agency, reportedly told career employees to ignore a memo from an appointee of the U.S. DOGE Service... Security officers escorted a top official at the Bureau of Land Management out of the agency’s building on Tuesday... Michael “Mike” Nedd, a 30-year veteran of the bureau who serves as deputy director for administration and programs... Politico reported that he had resisted a directive from an appointee of the U.S. DOGE Service... During President Donald Trump’s first term, Nedd served as acting director of BLM... Politico reported that Nedd instructed career BLM employees to...

Elon Musk joined Lara Trump on her show “My View” Saturday night on FOX News. During their conversation, Elon revealed that the DOGE Team found 100,000 federal employees collected uninsurance benefits while they were still at work. Collecting insurance benefits while still working is considered unemployment insurance fraud. Many states classify unemployment fraud as a misdemeanor or felony. Jail time is a significant risk and can range from several months to several years. Elon Musk says 100,000 government employees have committed this dishonest act. Elon Musk: We’ve actually found there’s a lot of people who are federal government employees. They’re...

When Pete Buttigieg was the Secretary of Transportation under President Biden (and whoever was actually making the calls at the White House during that time), one of the more glaring examples of bloated bureaucracy came in the form of what was required in order to qualify for government grants for infrastructure projects: Shortly after taking office, the president signed an executive order mandating that the beneficiaries of 40 percent of all federal climate and environmental programs should come from "underserved communities." The order also established the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which monitors agencies such as the Department of...

In January, the Palisades fire in Los Angeles burned 6800 buildings. In the two months since the fire was extinguished the City has issued only four permits to rebuild in the area. Residents who lost their homes are eager to build, but are finding that comedian Adam Carolla's prediction that it would be near to impossible to get a building permit is proving accurate. Democrat Mayor Karen Bass insists that "it would be foolish to rush things. With a fire of such magnitude we must carefully consider so many factors. I'm reminded by what I was taught growing up that...

The European Parliament has, once again, found itself at the heart of a corruption scandal, this time involving the Chinese tech giant Huawei. Police raids have been carried out across Belgium and Portugal amid suspicions of bribery, forgery, money laundering, and organized criminal activity. The European Parliament’s latest corruption scandal unfolds even as the previous one—the so-called ‘Qatargate’ affair—remains under investigation and litigation, further deepening preexisting concerns about foreign influence in EU institutions. The Qatargate scandal, which surfaced more than two years ago, involves allegations that Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), lobbyists, and their families accepted substantial sums of...

Everyone living in modernizing 'Western' societies will have noticed the long-term, progressive growth and spread of bureaucracy infiltrating all forms of social organization: nobody loves it, many loathe it, yet it keeps expanding. Such unrelenting growth implies that bureaucracy is parasitic and its growth uncontrollable - in other words it is a cancer that eludes the host immune system. Old-fashioned functional, 'rational' bureaucracy that incorporated individual decision-making is now all-but extinct, rendered obsolete by computerization. But modern bureaucracy evolved from it, the key 'parasitic' mutation being the introduction of committees for major decision-making or decision-ratification. Committees are a fundamentally irrational,...