It is not only unconstitutional, it is antithetical to our most basic principles
Among the most interesting possibilities under the incoming Trump administration is his appointment of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a new “Department of Government Efficiency.” While this will not be an official department, it will advise the president on how to significantly reduce the size and inefficiency of the administrative state. Musk has claimed the effort could reduce annual federal spending by as much as $2 trillion.
As welcome and necessary as such an undertaking may be, it does not nearly go far enough. In fact, its stated mission ignores the underlying problem with the administrative state: it is both unconstitutional and antithetical to America’s most important founding principles.
“Unconstitutional” is a much lower hurdle that the administrative state nevertheless fails to clear. The Constitution provides all sorts of powers that contradict founding principles. Chief among these is the Commerce Clause, which, however libertarians might like to think is limited strictly to prohibiting the states from imposing their own tariffs, is quite expansive. And the federal government still manages to abuse that power exponentially beyond its limits.
Much of the administrative state was built upon dubious interpretations of various commercial and personal behaviors as “interstate commerce,” including in one particularly ridiculous case producing milk on one’s own farm and consuming it on the premises.
Not only does the administrative state exercise power never delegated to the federal government in the first place, it does so in a wholly unconstitutional manner. The Constitution delegates the legislative power exclusively to Congress. Congress has no authority to re-delegate this to another branch of the government, but this is just what it has done in each case where it has authorized an executive branch agency to write enforceable rules.
Calling this legislation “regulations” instead of “laws” does not magically transform it into something else. Any written code either legally requiring or prohibiting human behavior is legislation. And delegation of the legislative power in whole or in part to another branch of the government would require a constitutional amendment.
In many cases these administrative agencies also usurp judicial powers by settling disputes in their own courts, presided over by administrative law judges. They thus unite the legislative, judicial, and executive power in a single agency, nullifying virtually all the Constitution’s structural checks on tyranny.
But even if the administrative state in its present form were remotely constitutional, or altered in form to become so, it would nevertheless be antithetical to liberty. The stated goal of every one of the agencies in the administrative state infringes the most basic rights of the individual according to the “general principles of liberty and the rights of man in nature and in society” according to Jefferson.