The GOP can’t ‘wield’ the administrative state without being corrupted by it
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The scandal came to light because of the tenacity of a 23-year-old guy with a camera. If the federal machine can miss fraud on that scale, imagine what else it misses.
Fraud saturates the system. Estimates run as high as $500 billion — roughly 7% of the $6.8 trillion federal budget. That budget still reflects COVID-era spending levels. In 2019, Washington spent $4.45 trillion. Why did we never return to pre-COVID levels?
Because money is power. And like Boromir, too many people convince themselves they can wield it.
Ethics are not enough
Energy policy shows the same temptation in real time.
My nonprofit organization, Power the Future, sent another letter to House and Senate oversight committees and to Attorney General Pam Bondi urging investigations into Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm. In the final days of the Biden administration, Granholm awarded $100 billion in green-energy grants — more than the previous 15 years combined. Many recipients had previously supported her political campaigns.
Green money poured out of Washington through the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated $60 billion for “environmental justice” — a phrase so deliberately amorphous that it has no fixed meaning. Team Biden spent $1 trillion “going green,” a statistic Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about during her lone 2024 debate with Donald Trump.
That entire structure still stands.
Nothing prevents the current energy secretary, Chris Wright, from spending billions on his favorite projects except his ethics. I believe Wright has ethics in abundance. We should feel grateful. But one man’s ethics do not qualify as a system of government.
The next secretary could be worse than Granholm. If the power remains, someone will use it.
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Empty the arsenal
Just as in Tolkien’s masterpiece, our enemies do not wait quietly. They scheme. They train. They amass armies of lawyers, activists, operatives, and bureaucrats. They build institutional pipelines that outlast elections. They do not go home after losing once. They plan the return.
Republicans need to plan as well — and their plan cannot be “use federal power while we have it, then trust the next guys.”
One party will not hold Washington forever. When conservatives lose power, they should make sure the left inherits a reduced federal government: weaker, narrower, stripped of the patronage systems and enforcement tools that now function as political weapons.
That is why it is incumbent upon congressional Republicans to do everything in their power — everything — to destroy the Ring.
America’s founders envisioned a weak federal government for this reason. In America’s 250th year, Congress should act like it understands the danger of concentrated power. If Republicans keep the machinery intact, they will regret it. If the Ring finds its next master, it will not spare the people who once held it.
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