[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already found an appalling amount of government waste, and it is just getting started. If the defenders of the swamp don’t defeat it, it will make the federal government simultaneously smaller and more efficient. One question that remains unanswered, however, and may be unanswerable, is that of how small it should really be. Here is a modest proposal to help approach an answer: how about take George Washington’s cabinet as a goal, or model?
The Constitution says that the President “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for.” It doesn’t say who exactly those “Officers of the United States” are.
Faced with this blank slate, the first president filled it in with the first cabinet. Washington appointed a secretary of state, a secretary of the treasury, a secretary of war, and an attorney general. That was it. Today, by contrast, Donald Trump presides over a cabinet consisting of the secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, secretary of defense, attorney general, secretary of the interior, secretary of agriculture, secretary of commerce, secretary of labor, secretary of health and human services, secretary of housing and urban development, secretary of transportation, secretary of energy, secretary of education, secretary of veterans affairs, secretary of homeland security, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, director of the Office of Management and Budget, director of National Intelligence, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, United States Trade Representative, and the administrator of the Small Business Administration.
Now, I’m not recommending that all these departments be swept away except for the original four (with “war” being transmuted into “defense” to suit modern sensibilities). After all, George Washington presided over a sparsely-populated eighteenth-century agrarian republic, not a global superpower that spanned a continent. Still, it would be worthwhile to examine this proliferation of agencies and evaluate whether each is really, or should be, the province of the federal government, or whether its duties could be performed more capably and efficiently if left to the individual states, or even to private enterprise.
After all, this is quite clear in the case of the department of education. Long before he became the left’s favorite ex-president, and was simply a failed and incompetent chief executive, Jimmy Carter established the department of education. One of Ronald Reagan’s campaign promises during the presidential campaign of 1980 was that he would close it, as it was an unnecessary centralization and bureaucratization of an educational system that had been getting along fine without a cabinet-level federal agency.
When Reagan took office, he appointed Terrel Bell to be his secretary of education, with the explicit task of dismantling the department. In this case, however, the swamp beat the Gipper, and the Education department stayed open.
All these years later, however, DOGE recently announced that “$881 million related to 89 DOE contracts was being cut. Of that $881 million, DOGE identified $101 million that was being used for DEI training, including teaching educators to ‘help students understand/interrogate the complex histories involved in oppression, and help students recognize areas of privilege and power on an individual and collective basis.’” Elon Musk pointed out what was no less outrageous for being obvious: “Your tax dollars were spent on this.”
Trump has also “signed two executive orders on education, one to remove federal funding from K-12 schools that teach critical race theory (CRT), and another to support school choice.” Nature abhors a vacuum, however. One hopes that Trump will also eventually mandate that American education be focused upon fostering a sense of patriotism, pride in one’s country, culture, and heritage, and the importance of national unity over identity politics and the Balkanization of America into a multitude of mutually hostile racial and ethnic identity factions.
Whatever happens, however, the decline in the quality of American education makes it abundantly clear that the department of education has been a massive failure. Reagan was right in his initial determination to close it down, and now it’s better late than never. If the DOE continues, far-left, green-haired, nose-ringed “educators” will continue to push their socialist internationalist agenda of gender delusion and hatred of America upon a new generation of schoolchildren. A nation that teaches its own children to hate it will not long endure.
And once the DOE is gone, let’s take a long look at these other departments, and ask the question, “What would George Washington do?”
