Draining the D.C. Swamp Picks Up Steam

The demand to clean the swamp is picking up in volume.

Examples?

Over there in The Hill is a swamp history lesson that reaches all the way back almost 120 years to the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. Penned by Michael Patrick Cullinane, the Lowman Walton chair of Theodore Roosevelt Studies at Dickinson State University and a public historian of the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

Cullinane writes:

After his 1904 landslide victory, Theodore Roosevelt asked New York banker Charles Keep to investigate government waste, personnel management, procurement, accounting practices, and inter-agency communication. Better known as the Keep Commission, it uncovered widespread inefficiencies.

This is to say, long, long ago in American history there was a president who realized the problems inherent with growing government. Ever since, there has been an increasing recognition that, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything you have.”

The withdrawal of now-former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz as the Trump nominee for attorney general only spotlights the serious problem at the Department of Justice.

Writing in the New York Post, conservative Miranda Devine notes that:

The first priority of the Trump administration’s new attorney general and FBI director will be to dismantle the ideological weaponization of the DOJ and FBI that has crushed the best people, forced the rest into silence and betrayed the American people.

National Review has highlighted just one example of this weaponization. In 2022, they ran this headline to a suddenly current story: “Pro-Life Activist Arrested After SWAT Team Raids Home with Guns Drawn in Front of ‘Screaming’ Children.”

Only a week ago, incoming first lady Melania Trump was in the news when she refused to head to Washington with her husband to make the traditional outgoing-ingoing first ladies meeting with the outgoing first lady Jill Biden. Why? The New York Post reported this (with bold print for emphasis supplied):

Melania Trump declined an offer to head to the White House Wednesday and meet with Jill Biden, citing the Biden administration’s raid on Mar-a-Lago as part of the federal government’s investigation into classified documents.

“She ain’t going,” a source familiar with Melania’s decision told The Post. “Jill Biden’s husband authorized the FBI snooping through her underwear drawer. The Bidens are disgusting,” the source said.

Over in the Wall Street Journal, the perceptive Dan Henninger asks this question in the headline: “Can Trump Bust Up the Beltway? Bureaucracies kept winning because no one paid attention to them. Until now”

Exactly.

Now, whether it’s the Department of Justice sending FBI agents to invade the home of a pro-life activist, terrorizing his kids, or sending FBI agents to raid Mar-a-Lago and ruffle through Melania Trump’s underwear drawer — not to mention turning the Department of Justice on Trump himself — the conduct and size of federal bureaucracies is, in fact, going to be drawing more attention in the Trump era.

Taking the long view, it is crystal clear that the understanding of the danger of sprawling Washington bureaucracies has been growing for a very long time. As noted, all the way back in 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt had started to pay attention to the problem.

In the Trump era, that growing attention to the Big Government problem is surfacing with the Cabinet nominations of Matt Gaetz to head the Department of Justice, Pete Hegseth to the Department of Defense, Robert Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to head the National Intelligence Agency.

Gaetz, targeted by critics, has now withdrawn. But the problems at the Department of Justice still remain and require a new attorney general who will stop the weaponization of the Department by left-wing activist bureaucrats.

As Henninger points out: No one has been paying attention to this problem … until now.

And clearly, the problem has the personal attention of the president-elect.