‘Deep’, ‘Administrative State’ & Project 2025

Policy-palooza: During the the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Heritage held a day-long Policy Fest.
Among the speakers were former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Sen. Mike Lee, and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt.
Paul Dans, director of Project 2025, talked about the lies and misinformation that the Left is spreading about this Heritage-led effort.

Tucker Carlson gave a speech and sat for a Q & A with Heritage President Dr. Kevin Roberts.
More than 90 members of the media were in attendance, including nine TV cameras, and it was streamed live on YouTube.

Among other things, Sen. Mike Lee described the ‘deep’ or ‘administrative state’ of un-elected bureaucrats that has taken over our government and needs to be dismantled. Here is his description of the ‘administrative state’:

Here is the simplest way to think about it.

In your junior high civics class you learned about the 3 branches of government:
– the Legislative branch, Congress, makes the laws
– The Executive branch, headed by the president, enforces the law
– The Judicial branch, interprets the laws, where people disagree about what it means, you gotta go to somebody who can say, yeah, this is what that means and then you can move forward.

By far the most dangerous of those three branches is the Legislative branch. We know that for a number of reasons. One, because it’s the most critical in terms of government deciding what government is going to do, and secondly that the founding fathers put the most guard rails around it. They gave that lawmaking power only to elected lawmakers, the branch of government most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals. You can fire all 435 members of the House every two years. You can fire a third of the members of the Senate every 2 years.

The administrative state is a quasi-fourth branch that exists technically within the executive branch, but functions almost as a super legislative branch and this is how it works.

In the late 1930s, Congress got a whole lot of additional power because the Supreme Court reimagined what regulating interstate commerce consists of. Congress found itself newly possessed with power to regulate labor, manufacturing, agriculture, mining, health, safety, and welfare and a bunch of other stuff that they had never had before. The US government couldn’t touch those things, but all of a sudden it could. So, Congress started passing platitudes instead of laws. We shall have good law in area X and we hereby delegate to commission or department or agency Y, the power to make and interpret and enforce good laws in area X.

More familiar examples:
– We shall have fair trade practices in the United States. Congress passes a law that says that. Then we give the Federal Trade Commission power to make and interpret and enforce their own law.
– We shall have clean air and we hereby give the EPA the power to decide what clean air is, what pollution is, how much you can pollute before we find you and throw you in prison, and what kind of pollution is more tolerable or less tolerable than others. You’ve got the law being made by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who work in these executive branch agencies.

Now, to put this in perspective, I’ve got these two monuments to law in my office here in DC.
– A short stack of documents which consists of laws passed by Congress last year, usually a few hundred to a few thousand pages.
– The other stack is about 100,000 pages and it consists of the Executive branch agencies, the administrative state law, what we call the federal register, the cumulative annual index of all these laws, that comes on about 100,000 pages. Those laws could put you in prison if you don’t obey them. They can fine you millions of dollars. They can shut down your business. And, yet they are written not by elected lawmakers, but by men and women not of your own choosing.

A law maker’s job is to make laws, not new law makers.

That’s a problem, that’s the administrative state, that’s why it’s so dangerous, and that’s why I made it my life’s mission to dismantle it.

Watch the entire Policy Fest event here

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