Power, Peace, and Knowing When To Shift Gears

Our Disruptor-in-Chief has grabbed the bloated federal corpus in his teeth and given it a good hard shake for 100 days. Many Americans have welcomed this forceful reassessment.

I count myself among them. My service as chief domestic policy adviser in the George W. Bush administration left me appalled at how truculently the federal blob resists reform. Bureaucratic inertia and managerial arrogance make even the most sensible improvements exhaustingly difficult. In my new book My West Wing, I describe how doggedly the “permanent state” in places like the FAA, VA, Education Department, and Fish & Wildlife Service obstructs efforts to revamp governance.

That’s how we ended up with a runaway federal train. When I left the White House in 2009, the national budget was less than $3 trillion. It was hardly lean and clean then. So consider that just 15 years later, federal spending and coercive power reached $7 trillion.