Chair’s Heavy Hand at the FTC Is an Example of the Administrative State Personified

Commentary One of the leading purposes of the populist Make America Great Again movement is to dismantle what its members call “the administrative state.” The populist take on the administrative state is that it is a vast bureaucracy, with the millions of civilian employees of the executive branch, that regulates an enormous percentage of the U.S. government, foreign policy, and economy. Congress nominally oversees their activities, but, in practice, the administrative state is largely left to its own devices, earning the enmity of the small-government, conservative populists that make up the MAGA movement. How Did We Get Here? The American administrative state was born of President Woodrow Wilson’s 1887 essay, “The Study of Administration,” written years before he was elected....