The Constitutional Case for Cutting Government Spending

A screen displaying the U.S. national debt is seen in Manhattan on April 11, 2025. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

A majority of Americans, fed up with chronic government budget deficits, an ever-growing national debt, and the obnoxious obtrusiveness of federal bureaucracies, clearly share the goal of slashing government spending.

Over many decades, the federal government has adopted various practices that are fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. Radical reforms are needed to free us from these deleterious practices. The good news is that we don’t need to come up with a brand-new plan; we simply need to bring governance into literal compliance with our hallowed Constitution.

The bad news is that the reforms I am about to set forth are not politically realistic, achievable objectives at present. Breaking bad habits is rarely easy and millions of Americans who are comfortable with the status quo will (as we can see already) vigorously resist efforts for reform. The bottom line, however, is that the Constitution provides the answers to our problems of misgovernance, if only we would abide by its principles.

President Donald Trump’s team, spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has already started to challenge the unconstitutional excesses of government bureaucracies. The federal bureaucracies virtually make up a fourth branch of government. The Constitution stipulates only three branches of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—so right there, a constitutional aberration is apparent.

Although technically part of the executive branch of government, bureaucracies have usurped both legislative and judicial functions. One of the more flagrant abuses uncovered by Elon Musk’s team at DOGE was the Environmental Protection Agency’s grant of $2 billion to a six-month-old nonprofit with only $100 in the bank. But why are unelected federal bureaucrats giving grants to anyone? The power of the purse, i.e., the constitutional authority to spend money, is a prerogative of Congress, the legislative branch.

Similarly, bureaucracies promulgate an overwhelming percentage of the rules that govern our society. In 2024, for example, federal agencies issued 3,248 rules while Congress enacted 175 laws. That’s 19 rules for every law passed by Congress. Last year’s ratio was actually below the recent average. In 2023, there were 44 times as many rules issued by bureaucracies as passed by Congress. The average over the past decade has been 23 rules for every law.

Clearly, bureaucracies have usurped the legislative prerogative of Congress in violation of the constitutional separation of powers. This is unconscionable. We are a democratic republic in which the people get to vote for or against the people who write the rules that we must obey. The fact that unelected bureaucrats, virtually unaccountable to the people, are writing most of the rules by which we live is a constitutional abomination.

This evil is compounded by the way bureaucracies assume quasi-judicial powers. Apologists for bureaucracies claim that bureaucrats need to interpret what laws passed by Congress mean and how they apply in specific cases. The Supreme Court has started to peel back this unconstitutional usurpation by revoking the so-called Chevron Doctrine in last year’s Loper Enterprises v. Raimondo decision, but that doesn’t go far enough. Traditionally, questions about how a law applied in a specific situation were resolved in court through our common-law system of justice. In practice today, in what is called “administrative law,” executive branch bureaucrats often act as judge and jury, again vitiating the constitutional balance of power.

It is too early to predict how much long-term success Team Trump will achieve in extirpating the powers that have been arrogated by the unconstitutional “fourth branch of government,” but I wish them well as they fight this good fight.

That being said, there is another class of constitutional malpractice that has opened the floodgates for government overspending. Just as the Constitution does not authorize unelected government employees to formulate the rules by which we live, decide how to dole out federal funds, or sit in judgment of American citizens, neither does the Constitution authorize federal intervention into everyday economic activities, such as education, agriculture, and energy.

The 10th Amendment (arguably the most violated part of the Constitution) plainly states, “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.”

Thus, since the Constitution does not authorize the federal government to get involved in, say, agriculture, the government currently has no authority to intervene in agricultural affairs. If Americans want such government powers, the Constitution can be amended to add that power to the powers already stipulated.

The American Founders viewed the Constitution as authorizing a government limited to the few specific functions explicitly enumerated in Article I.

James Jackson, a member of the House of Representatives in the first Congress, said, “We must confine ourselves to the powers described in the Constitution, and the moment we pass it, we take an arbitrary stride towards a despotic Government.”

In a similar vein, James Madison, widely regarded as the principal architect of the Constitution (a case can be made that Pelatiah Webster was the true father of the Constitution, but that’s a discussion for another time), warned, “If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money ... the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one.”

There is no explicit mention of education, agriculture, or energy in the Constitution, and therefore, the federal government was never granted power to become involved in those important fields of human endeavor. The same is true of transportation, housing, health, labor, and so on, but for now, let’s conduct a thought experiment confined to those three areas of economic activity: Let’s pretend that the departments of education, agriculture, and energy were to magically disappear overnight.

If those three federal bureaucracies were dismantled—privatizing those functions that have market value and letting all the subsidies, studies, grants, and so forth fall into a deserved oblivion—what do you think would happen? Would food, schooling, and energy disappear? Not a chance! On the contrary, the result would be liberating: It would free Americans from the superstitious belief that we need government’s help to educate our kids or to supply us with food and energy. Once Americans see that government is not only nonessential, but also wasteful and unnecessarily costly, future efforts to shrink the federal leviathan will come more easily.

Again, such a reform sounds very radical today, but earlier generations of Americans didn’t need the federal government to provide the things we need. Nor do we today need Uncle Sam’s “help” other than to maintain domestic peace and enforce justice (true justice, that is—the impartial kind, not fraudulent counterfeits like “social justice”).

The current efforts of the Trump administration to shrink the federal government are to be commended. However, they are just the first steps on the way back to an affordable, truly constitutional government.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.