The Claremont Institute’s Latest Report Unmasks America’s Government by the Unelected
Washington, D.C.—The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life has released a comprehensive analysis by Claremont Senior Fellow and Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College, Dr. Ronald J. Pestritto, detailing the progress the Trump administration has made thus far in restoring presidential control and republican checks over the unaccountable federal bureaucracy.
Titled “Government by the Unelected: How It Happened, and How It Might Be Tamed,” Dr. Pestritto carefully traces the origin of the bureaucratic leviathan to the Progressive Era’s assault on the Founders’ constitutional vision. Dr. Pestritto examines how federal courts enabled the administrative state’s growth across nearly a century, and assesses the current administration’s systematic campaign to roll it back.
“Roosevelt, like Wilson, understood that the newly empowered federal bureaucracy could not coexist with the original constitutional vision of federalism or of separation of powers,” wrote Dr. Pestritto. “While the framework of the Constitution rested on each branch of government maintaining firm control over its own jurisdiction and kept administration subservient to an elected executive, this framework was inadequate for the scope and efficiency needed for modern administration.”
As early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dr. Pestritto highlights that progressive “reformers” like Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow undermined the Constitution’s separation of powers, replacing the founders’ vision of limited government with a centralized national administrative apparatus.
The administrative state’s enabling partner, shortly after Congress passed the New Deal, became the Supreme Court. Landmark decisions from the 1930s onward systematically cleared the way for agencies to make significant policy decisions with minimal oversight or accountability to the elected branches or to the voters who elect them.
“Congress has, by law, long ago abdicated the bulk of its Article I powers in creating, empowering, and funding the administrative state,” explained Dr. Pestritto.
However, President Trump’s victory in 2024 brought with it the hopes of stopping the seemingly endless spiral towards unaccountable bureaucratic rule. So far, Dr. Pestritto concludes, the Trump administration has launched the most systematic effort since the New Deal to recapture executive power from the unelected class.
“The Trump administration’s deeper project to rein in the bureaucracy has proceeded on two primary fronts: (1) a wide scale reconsideration of regulations implemented during the Obama and Biden administrations; and (2) making bureaucratic entities fall in line with the president’s agenda through a robust assertion of the president’s power to remove agency commissioners and other top officials,” reads the report.
Significant obstacles do remain, Dr. Pestritto cautions. Federal courts continue to obstruct presidential initiatives through preliminary injunctions granted by district judges sympathetic to the administrative state. Ultimately, he emphasizes, genuine restoration of popular government depends on Congress asserting its own Article I powers—a muscle the legislative branch has not stretched for quite some time.
“It is certainly a positive development that agencies must now undergo greater legal scrutiny; yet if the end result is to shift governing power out of unelected agencies, and into the unelected courts, one can reasonably ask how useful this shift is for restoring government by the consent of the governed,” concluded Pestritto.
“Courts have many means at their disposal for second-guessing administrative decision making, means that can be applied with equal force when administrative decision making is in line with the policies of the elected president, and when it is against his policies,” he added.
The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life released this analysis as part of its special edition Provocations series commemorating America’s 250th anniversary, designed to guide current and future administrations in the project of restoring the principles of constitutional self-government that animated the American Founding.
About the Author
Dr. Ronald J. Pestritto is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, writing primarily on the history and pernicious origins of progressivism and the administrative state. Dr. Pestritto is also Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College, where he holds the Charles and Lucia Shipley Chair in the American Constitution. He earned his B.A from Claremont McKenna College in 1990 and Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University in 1996.
About The Claremont Institute
The Claremont Institute is dedicated to restoring the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Through scholarship, public policy, and educational initiatives, The Claremont Institute seeks to recover America’s founding principles and advance a government based on the enduring truths of the Declaration of Independence.
