There is a particular kind of dishonesty that wears the face of competence. It tells you the elected branches are too slow, too crude, too captured by passion to handle the technical demands of modern government. It offers you, in their place, an expert class operating inside agencies whose directors you did not choose, whose rules carry the force of law, and whose budgets are insulated from the consequences of their own failures. What you are watching, if you are watching clearly, is not the modernization of democracy. It is its quiet replacement.
Administrative power has become the dominant form of governance in the United States, and the political class has convinced itself this is a sign of sophistication rather than a warning about accountability. Every significant economic regulation, every labor standard, every environmental threshold, every financial rule that shapes how ordinary Americans earn and spend arrives not from a floor vote but from a rulemaking process buried inside an executive agency staffed by people who regard electoral politics as something that happens to other people. The legislature has been systematically relieved of its burden, and it has accepted that relief gladly, because legislating is hard and losing elections over what you legislated is harder.
Realist statecraft has always understood something that reformers prefer to ignore: the form of power matters as much as its content. A policy enacted by accountable representatives who can be turned out of office is categorically different from the same policy issued by a bureau that cannot be. Not because the policy is wrong, but because power without accountability corrodes the institutions that contain it. The bureau that issues a rule it cannot defend at the ballot box learns a habit of insulation. It learns to treat public opposition as ignorance to be managed, not as legitimate dissent to be answered. And once an institution learns that habit, the habit is nearly impossible to unlearn.
The facts of the current situation are not in dispute, whatever one’s politics. The Federal Register, the official daily journal of federal rules and proposed rules, has in recent decades run to tens of thousands of pages annually. Congress passes between two and three hundred laws in a typical two-year session. Federal agencies issue several thousand rules in that same period. The ratio is not a quirk of the system. It is the system. The elected branch has become a ratifying body for administrative decisions already made by people who do not answer to voters in any direct or timely way. When the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo overturned the Chevron doctrine, ending the four-decade practice of courts deferring to agencies’ own interpretations of their statutory authority, the reaction from the administrative class was telling. They did not argue the courts were wrong on the merits. They argued, with barely concealed alarm, that the agencies needed that deference to function. Which is another way of saying they needed it to govern without challenge.
The named enemy here is not the bureaucrat as an individual. Most of the people inside these agencies believe they are doing necessary work, and some of them are right. The enemy is the structural arrangement that removes consequential decisions from political accountability and places them inside institutions that have every incentive to expand their own authority and no electoral mechanism to punish overreach. It is the arrangement that allows a regulatory agency to impose billions of dollars in compliance costs on an industry through a notice-and-comment process that is technically open to public input and practically designed to limit its effect. It is the arrangement that has, over decades, taught the political class that governing means managing agencies rather than making law, and taught the public that nothing it votes for will actually change what the agencies do.
Four things would begin to reverse this. First, Congress must reassert the nondelegation principle in practice, not just in rhetoric. When it authorizes an agency to regulate, it must specify the authority being granted with enough precision that a court can test whether the agency exceeded it. Vague grants of power to regulate in the public interest are not legislation. They are abdications. Second, major rules, meaning rules with significant economic or social impact, should require affirmative Congressional approval before they take effect. The Congressional Review Act exists but has been used sparingly. It should become routine. Third, agency budgets should be tied explicitly to performance measures that Congress controls, not measures the agency sets for itself. An institution that writes its own report card will always pass. Fourth, the civil service protections that make senior agency officials practically immovable should be reformed to preserve career neutrality for rank-and-file workers while ensuring that policy-level positions are genuinely accountable to elected leadership. Tenure without accountability is not a protection against politicization. It is a different form of it.
None of this is painless. Agencies exist because Congress created them to handle things it found inconvenient to handle directly. Reclaiming that authority means reclaiming the political cost that comes with it. Legislators will have to vote on things they currently hide behind agency rulemaking to avoid. Some of them will lose elections as a result. That is not a flaw in the prescription. That is the point. Democracy has costs, and the American political class has spent forty years finding ways to externalize those costs onto an unelected administrative structure that is answerable to no one who can be voted out in November.
The irony that should keep institutional defenders awake at night is this: the administrative state they built to insulate good policy from bad politics has done more to discredit the idea of competent government than any demagogue ever managed on his own.
Lucius Quirinus is a columnist for The Republic Standard.