Now We’re Talking!
A golden opportunity for real change—if congressional Republicans will take it.
One of the things I learned in my brief tenure in Washington is how difficult it is to turn the ship of state in the ‘right’ direction. Partially by design, mostly by bureaucracy, the federal government is a massive ocean-liner whose inertia is such that a Herculean effort is required to turn it even a half-a-degree starboard.
Which is why one of the largest reductions in the federal bureaucracy since the end of World War II is so gratifying. Between firings and DOGE-inspred early retirement buyouts, tens of thousands of bureaucrats are now in the private sector job market.
At the start of the last year, there were roughly 2.4 million civilian federal employees and the goal is to get that number to below 2 million by the end of 2028.1 Thankfully, the Pentagon’s 741,477 civilian employees (you read that right) are on the block as well. Secretary Pete Hegseth has already started making down payments on reducing the most ‘woke’ among them.2
Trump 47 is on a mission to tame the Leviathan.
And it’s willing to ‘fight fire with fire’ to get it done. Something Wall Street Journal Republicans have yet to comprehend. They’d much rather praise each other on being the guardians of the status quo while the rest of us are forced to man the lifeboats.
Preserving the legislative filibuster so that Democrats can summarily remove it later when it suits them is just one example of the GOP establishment’s failure to understand how important it is to use power when you have it.
Another is the use of ‘executive orders’ (EOs).
The Clinton-Obama-Biden administrations had no reservations in stretching the application of enabling legislation so as to make policy changes from the Oval Office. Fortunately, neither does Trump 47.3 Imagine that, a Republican President willing to utilize the very tools his adversaries do.
This is not sacrificing principle. No, far from it as none other than Thomas Jefferson once declared: