What did our founders think about government? How would they transpose their thoughts into 21st century America? How would they regard the government we have today? These are questions that are continually asked in one form or another by citizens, legislatures, and Supreme Court justices.
We know a great deal about what our founders thought about these matters. James Madison took detailed notes every day at the Constitutional convention in 1787. They were published posthumously, and are available now in paperback. During the ratification debate in 1787-88 individuals of all political stripes published their opinions on the Constitution (the Federalist Papers were only a small part of this newsprint tsunami), and most are available in print today. The Congressional Record contains legislators’ views about the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments), which was passed in 1790.
So, there is little mystery concerning our founders' thoughts. While we can debate what they might say about certain rights transposed into a modern society, there is one subject about which there can be no debate. The founders would be aghast at the size of our federal government and at the power wielded by our executive branch.
The war liberating the Constitution’s framers from the clutches of monarchy was fresh in their minds. Of the 55 gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to reform the executive-less Articles of Confederation only one, Alexander Hamilton, spoke out in favor of a powerful President. Some didn't want a chief executive at all. There is no question but that our founders would be horrified to see what we have done with presidential authority and executive branch scope.
To put things in perspective, there were three million people in the United States when George Washington ended his second term. The federal budget was $5 million, and the executive branch employed fewer than 100 people, most of them in post offices. At the moment this country has 300 million people and has a federal budget of $7 trillion. In addition a recent Washington Post series revealed that our intelligence services alone have 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances. Both the Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence have said that they don't know what all of them are doing.
The executive branch of our government has become a mare's nest of vast bureaucracies. Some like the Department of Homeland Security and the Directorate of National Intelligence were created in the wake of 9/11. Others are even more recent. The passage of health care and financial "reform" legislation has given birth to fresh swarms of bureaucrats, making federal employment an even more rapidly growing entity than the budget.
This growth might possibly be acceptable if there were some evidence that it was productive. But there are heaps of evidence proving massive waste, distressing lack of communication, and widespread incompetence. The theory that the world's increasingly complex problems demand increasingly large cadres of expensive technocrats hasn't proven to be true in practice. This theory was floated first in 1880 when a group of intellectuals, including Charles Francis Adams, Henry Ward Beecher, and Carl Schurz, advocated that the executive branch be staffed with elite academics. The group called themselves Mugwumps, which was a corrupted version of an Iroquois word for "big chiefs." Their concept didn't catch on. Neither did FDR's "brain trust" of academics who came to Washington with him in 1932, but shortly thereafter began to disperse.
I don't spend much time searching for the original intent of our founders as it might apply to a spectrum of current issues. However, I am drawn to their unmistakable views on executive branch size and potency. Given the lack of results our elephantine collection of executive bureaucrats with their tentacles into every facet of our lives have been able to produce, perhaps it is time to pay more attention to our founders. Maybe they were on to something. The time has come to wave goodbye to a large swath of our Mugwumps, and hold the remainder far more accountable.