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Organisms attempt to grow. Unless there is a countermeasure, they will grow. There was for a long time no countermeasure to bureaucracy and therefore it grew.
This is not really true.
Wilson's Bureaucracy does a good job of showing empirical cases where agencies resisted growth and scope creep, but it was hoisted upon them.
Public choice theory is great overall, but Wilson pointed out where it got a little overdone in some respects.
Oh, and it's true because the bureaucracy grew a ton starting in the 30s, but in terms of government civilians it's been flat (and therefore proportionately lower) for some decades now. Of course, spending and regulation has gone up, overall including spending on contractors and NGOs.
There should always be the countermeasure of "can we afford this?"
Deficit spending outside defined emergency conditions ought to be unpermitted.
That seems like an overly narrow definition of bureaucracy. All of the revolving door between the official bureaucracy and the related contractors (with people going back and forth) form the true bureaucracy.
Well, I'd argue "bureaucracy" is an overly narrow conception of what the problem is with "big government."
I don't know how much "revolving door" you think there is, but it's not all that much in my experience in the DoD/IC. Mostly, people leave federal/mil service to become a contractor for more money doing much the same job.
Mostly though, the idea that you can map any given government agency onto a model where it always or by default seeks to maximize its size/budget/power/whatever is empirically false. That is often true, but it's a loose assumption. Or often various subunits of a given agency have ambitious careerists trying to maximize their impact via mission growth, but that is a zero-sum competition by default as the overall agency has a set budget.
Mostly, as someone with a (past) career and professional education in government bureaucracy, I get a bit up in arms about simplistic notions of government bureaucracy because it leads to obvious idiocy like DOGE, instead of actually getting us limited, effective government.
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I think honestly any future government would do well to have an automatic sunset to the creation of new agencies. Once a generation we really need to look into whether or not the laws, mandates, regulations, and agencies we built for the crisis of the moment even make sense generations later. It would also prevent those agencies from deciding on their own to do things that harm the country. If you know that in five years your environmental agency will be called to defend its right to exist, you might well think twice before regulating carbon and other common chemicals, or at least keep the regulatory regime as light as possible.
Every year, technically, agencies have to justify their budgets. Any given agency could be eliminated by Congress at nearly any time, if they so chose. The USAID demolition for example is a problem procedurally because Trump is trying to use the executive branch to effectively nullify what the legislative has done in creating and funding it. If you think a weak legislative branch and a lack of separation of powers is a big problem, this is not a positive development overall.
Sunset clauses always sound better in theory than they work in practice as an accountability mechanism. (Just ask the haters of FISA 702 about that.)
Nothing but mandated fiscal responsibility solves the overall problem of government spending growth. Regulatory growth is a harder nut to crack, since no budget is necessarily required. Perhaps law sunsets could help there because they would at least force a review, but that also generates a lot of work that itself could be a pretty big drag.
I’d agree very strongly with balanced budget amendments as good. But I don’t see any way to slow the growth of regulatory agencies other than having the government — be it executive or legislative — have to manually re-approve the agency (with the default being no) at regular intervals will at least allow for review and revision and avoid mission creep. If we have a department of horse welfare in 2025, it doesn’t need to exist anymore because few people need horses for transportation.
If there is some non-trivial amount of work to re-review each regulation, then a balanced budget would also impose limits on at least the number of regulations. It would be harder to account for the impact of a regulation's scope though. Maybe if it was coupled with constitutionally-backed standing to sue if you are affected by a regulation which doesn't meet strict scrutiny for not being over-broad.
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The problem is almost never that an agency outlives the original purpose, like horses becoming largely irrelevant.
The problem is that the original purpose is inflated, particularly in a regulatory way. But that's usually not literally the agency's fault. It's usually a combo the Congress and the courts, and/or a presidential initiative. So the Department of Transportation is forever, horses or not. "Do they have good policies?" is the real question and a harder one to answer.
We have the system we have because "we" "wanted" it. Manual reapproval would be very hard to even design--look at how there's gridlock for the budget. Scaling that up won't help us get an effective limited government.
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