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Deconstructing the Administrative State
This book discusses a battle of ideologies that has lasted over a century and continues today, pitting those who defend the American Experiment and the constitutional structure against those who seek to replace that structure with one that empowers them to implement their ideas with little or no popular input. Progressives want governance by experts - bureaucrats with administrative power to make political judgments on how people must live, thereby narrowing the realm of their liberty. They expand the administrative state and create an identity of interest with Big Business. Both groups want an ever-expanding government: one motivated by power, the other by money. For its part, Big Business has set up camp on Capitol Hill, lavishly funding establishment politicians, of both parties, who rationalize the need for campaign money to the detriment of waging the good fight. Together, politicians and their cronies elbow the citizen off the policy-making stage. However, this state of affairs is kindling the passions of the constitutional structure's greatest "check" on government excess - the American people. This is a fight that can be won. Deconstructing the Administrative State offers the blueprint for victory. Emmett McGroarty is a senior fellow at the American Principles Project Foundation (APPF). He is a graduate of Georgetown University and Fordham School of Law. Jane Robbins is a senior fellow at APPF. She is a graduate of Clemson University (the 2016 national football champions) and Harvard Law School. Erin Tuttle is a policy analyst at APPF and a graduate of Indiana University.
- GenresPolitics
335 pages, Paperback
Published December 19, 2017
19 people want to read
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March 19, 2018
By Deconstructing the Administrative State the authors don’t appear to mean getting rid of it. There are only about ten pages tacked on to the end for “Solutions”. I expect they are using deconstruct in the more academic sense that, in this case, means explaining how it works and, to a lesser extent, how it got that way.
This is a very recent book, which means it can use examples from Donald Trump’s presidency as well as from earlier administrations. It also references Colorado Representative Ken Buck’s Drain the Swamp: How Washington Corruption is Worse Than You Think in its “Winners and Losers” chapter on how Big Business tends to support the administrative state in large part because it makes Small Business—that is, their otherwise more agile competitors—harder to start and to maintain.
The book’s weakness is that it tends to state by assertion in the text; it is heavily footnoted, and presumably the evidence for the assertions is in the footnotes—in fact one reason I intend to keep this book is that it is a great resource for other texts to read—but the lack of explanation is sometimes frustrating. For example, in the section on how the National Science Foundation expanded from university scholarships and graduate fellowships to developing K-12 programs, they write that Congress “
Is that really a “broad” interpretation of the law’s phrasing of education at all levels? What would a narrow interpretation of at all levels look like? I don’t doubt that there is one, I just don’t know what it would be, and the authors don’t explain.
Similarly, I started reading much more closely in the chapter on “Federally Funded Research” and how federal funding tends strongly to crowd out viewpoints, angles, and lines of research that the administrative state is uninterested in or that offers the potential of alternate solutions. The chapter starts with a quote from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, but not the oft-quoted section about the military-industrial complex; rather, the mostly-forgotten warning about “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money… [and] the equal and opposite danger that public policy itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
It has seemed to me recently that some critical medical and other advances have been severely retarded by the dominance of federal funding, such as the research into prions; and how federal research into pedagogy always seems to discover that not only was the previous research flawed, but that the way to fix it is to double down with more money and more power.
And the chapter does a great job of explaining how federal agencies use research the way a drunkard uses a lamp-post, but if there are examples they are probably in the copious footnoted works, not the main text.
But this book covers a lot of ground; in many ways it is a companion piece to other books such as Peter Schweizer’s detailed explanations of how politicians extort constituencies for donations, or Ken Buck’s explanation of how the parties encourage and require their members to take part in the extortion. Reading this book will help you recognize “local” ad campaigns that likely originated in some federal adminisrator’s DC office; and recognize the tricks that congress uses to keep people disengaged, so that congress can pass legislation without anyone watching.
The authors have their own definite viewpoint, that the administrative state stifles freedom and does so without an offsetting benefit. But they also do a good job of representing the proponents of the administrative state, who speak in terms of experts unshackled by politics. It occasionally made me wish for something this book is not, a dispassionate description of the arguments both sides make, so that each can understand the other.
This is not that book, but it is a useful overview of the workings and, to a lesser extent, the rise, of the administrative state.
This is a very recent book, which means it can use examples from Donald Trump’s presidency as well as from earlier administrations. It also references Colorado Representative Ken Buck’s Drain the Swamp: How Washington Corruption is Worse Than You Think in its “Winners and Losers” chapter on how Big Business tends to support the administrative state in large part because it makes Small Business—that is, their otherwise more agile competitors—harder to start and to maintain.
The book’s weakness is that it tends to state by assertion in the text; it is heavily footnoted, and presumably the evidence for the assertions is in the footnotes—in fact one reason I intend to keep this book is that it is a great resource for other texts to read—but the lack of explanation is sometimes frustrating. For example, in the section on how the National Science Foundation expanded from university scholarships and graduate fellowships to developing K-12 programs, they write that Congress “
…amended the [NSF’s] original statute to include “science education programs at all levels in the mathematical, physical, medical, biological, engineering, social, and other sciences”.
Since that time, the NSF has interpreted the language ”at all levels“ very broadly. The NSF’s interpretation now encompasses pre-K through 12, community colleges, and universities, and even extends to informal settings such as museums, parks, and community centers.
Is that really a “broad” interpretation of the law’s phrasing of education at all levels? What would a narrow interpretation of at all levels look like? I don’t doubt that there is one, I just don’t know what it would be, and the authors don’t explain.
Similarly, I started reading much more closely in the chapter on “Federally Funded Research” and how federal funding tends strongly to crowd out viewpoints, angles, and lines of research that the administrative state is uninterested in or that offers the potential of alternate solutions. The chapter starts with a quote from President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, but not the oft-quoted section about the military-industrial complex; rather, the mostly-forgotten warning about “the prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money… [and] the equal and opposite danger that public policy itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
It has seemed to me recently that some critical medical and other advances have been severely retarded by the dominance of federal funding, such as the research into prions; and how federal research into pedagogy always seems to discover that not only was the previous research flawed, but that the way to fix it is to double down with more money and more power.
And the chapter does a great job of explaining how federal agencies use research the way a drunkard uses a lamp-post, but if there are examples they are probably in the copious footnoted works, not the main text.
But this book covers a lot of ground; in many ways it is a companion piece to other books such as Peter Schweizer’s detailed explanations of how politicians extort constituencies for donations, or Ken Buck’s explanation of how the parties encourage and require their members to take part in the extortion. Reading this book will help you recognize “local” ad campaigns that likely originated in some federal adminisrator’s DC office; and recognize the tricks that congress uses to keep people disengaged, so that congress can pass legislation without anyone watching.
The authors have their own definite viewpoint, that the administrative state stifles freedom and does so without an offsetting benefit. But they also do a good job of representing the proponents of the administrative state, who speak in terms of experts unshackled by politics. It occasionally made me wish for something this book is not, a dispassionate description of the arguments both sides make, so that each can understand the other.
This is not that book, but it is a useful overview of the workings and, to a lesser extent, the rise, of the administrative state.
Power always thinks it has a great soul, and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God service, when it is violating all His laws.—John Adams, to Thomas Jefferson
Displaying 1 of 1 review