I got a tattoo in 1991. I was 17, it was a tribal band around my left bicep, and I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever done. By 1994 I knew it was a mistake. By 1998 I was actively embarrassed by it. By 2005 I had looked into removal and found out it was going to cost four times what the original tattoo cost and hurt significantly more going out than it did going in.
I still have the tattoo. I have made my peace with it. It is a reminder that decisions made in the moment with incomplete information and a certain amount of peer pressure tend to look different ten years later.
The federal government is the same tattoo. Larger. More expensive. Significantly harder to remove.
Let Frank explain.
Every major expansion of the federal government in the last hundred years followed the same pattern. There was a problem, real or manufactured. There was a sense of urgency, genuine or engineered. There was a solution proposed, usually by people who stood to benefit from the solution existing. That solution was implemented quickly, funded generously, and staffed immediately with people whose entire professional existence now depended on the problem never fully going away.
Then the problem either got worse, stayed the same, or quietly resolved itself through means unrelated to the program designed to fix it. The program remained. The staff remained. The budget not only remained but grew, because in Washington a program that has not solved its problem clearly needs more funding to solve it.
This is not a theory. This is accounting. Look at any federal agency created in the last fifty years and find one that has declared victory and shut itself down. Frank will wait.
The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to solve the energy crisis. We have had several energy crises since 1977. The Department of Energy has 14,000 employees and a $48 billion annual budget. The energy crisis it was created to solve is not solved. The department, however, is thriving.
The Department of Education was created in 1979. In 1979 American students ranked near the top globally in math and reading. Frank does not need to tell you where they rank now. The Department of Education has 4,000 employees and a $238 billion annual budget. The kids are not smarter. The department is not smaller.
Frank is not saying these agencies have done nothing. Frank is saying that the relationship between what they spend and what they produce would get a private business shut down inside of three years. In Washington it gets you a budget increase.
Here is the part that actually matters.
The Founders were deeply suspicious of a large permanent federal bureaucracy. Not because they were unsophisticated. Because they were the opposite. They had lived under one. They had watched what happens when the people administering the government become more concerned with administering the government than with the people the government exists to serve.
The Constitution they wrote gave the federal government specific, enumerated powers. The word they used was enumerated. Listed. Defined. Not suggested. Not open to creative interpretation based on what a particular Congress thought was a good idea that week.
The Tenth Amendment is the one nobody talks about. It is eleven words. Frank has it memorized because it is one of the most important sentences in the document and also one of the most ignored. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Not to the federal agencies. Not to the departments. Not to the 2.87 million federal civilian employees whose jobs depend on those powers never going back to where they belong.
To the States. Or to the people.
The tattoo metaphor breaks down here in one important way.
A bad tattoo cannot take your money. A bad tattoo cannot regulate your business, tax your income, tell you what you can put in your body, determine what your kids learn in school, or send you a form that takes four hours to complete in order to access something you already paid for.
A bad tattoo is just embarrassing. The federal government is embarrassing and expensive and increasingly convinced it knows better than you do about every aspect of your life.
The removal process, constitutionally speaking, exists. It is called elections, and it is called holding your elected representatives to the specific job description written in 1787 by people who thought very carefully about what they were doing.
Frank votes. Frank pays attention. Frank reads the document.
Frank also still has the tattoo. But at least the tattoo does not regulate him.
— Frank