Lurking deep in the depths of alphabet agencies dotted around our nation’s capital is a network of bureaucrats and agency heads who possess incredible amounts of power. On a whim, with a guidance letter or a self-serving rule, they can ruin your livelihood and are the greatest internal threat to the survival of our system of self-government.
This “Administrative State” is completely antithetical to the vision of our founders. It gives unelected bureaucrats the power to enact rules that have the full force and effect of law and that can affect individuals and entire industries.
Do you remember voting for the chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission? Of course you don’t, because you didn’t. And, what is the CPSC? Among other goofy things they do, it’s the same organization behind the push to ban gas stoves, without any regard for families or restauranteurs who rely on their gas stoves to feed families. Not only are they detached from reality, nobody at the CPSC was elected to make those decisions and are not accountable to you in any way, shape or form. (RELATED: SUZANNE DOWNING: We’ve Entered An Era When The US Gov’t Won’t Even Take Its Own Money)
Do you remember voting for any deputy or assistant secretary at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration? That’s right, you don’t, because you didn’t. OSHA, which was created to make sure forklifts beep when they back up, attempted to impose a medical procedure on roughly 100 million Americans. When I was Attorney General of Missouri, I sued and successfully stopped this vaccine mandate on employers or businesses with 100 or more employees at the Supreme Court of the United States. But think about that for a second. A group of bureaucrats that you never voted for and probably have never heard of wanted to mandate that you get a medical procedure just to keep your job.
Do you remember voting for any deputy undersecretary at the Environmental Protection Agency? Right again, you don’t, because you didn’t. The EPA is yet again attempting to impose the Waters of the United States rule, which would give the federal government control over massive swaths of land in Missouri, land that is owned by farmers and ranchers. These people who have probably never stepped foot on Missouri farmland want to brand dry creek beds and drainage ditches as “navigable waterways,” all in the name of the “environment,” but as with most of these things, it’s not about that at all, it’s really about power and control. Farmers and ranchers are the original stewards of the land. They don’t need some bureaucrat in DC to regulate every square inch of their property.
There are hundreds of federal government agencies that employ thousands and thousands of employees. The tentacles are ubiquitous and the rot is deep.
The Administrative State can fly under the radar, but it affects nearly everyone. You and you alone should have the power to make decisions that affect you and your family, not some bureaucrat at an agency you’ve never heard of.
My top priority as a U.S. Senator will be to dismantle this network of entrenched, unelected bureaucrats with unchecked power, and return to a system of self-governance, based on the principles of federalism and separation of powers championed by the founders intended to protect individual liberty. We need to pry power out of the hands of these bureaucrats and return it to where it belongs, to the Article I branch and back to We the People.
Eric Schmitt is the junior U.S. Senator from Missouri.
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