Stephen Bannon wants to dismantle your government: Ross Baker

Presidential adviser Stephen Bannon has made a bold vow: "Deconstruction of the administrative state." For Bannon to use a term invented by French academic literary critics, the founding fathers of political correctness, is ironic. Achieving the goal in four or even eight years is an iridescent dream because it would require the uprooting of a 130-year-old complex of institutions, practices and statutes that no Congress, however partisan, would agree to.

The origins of the administrative state — essentially the government bureaucracy — can be found in the tumultuous period after the Civil War, when railroad companies enjoyed natural monopolies in the territories they served. Encouraged by government gifts of public land, the railroads provided more than passenger service; they were the means by which farmers got their crops and livestock to market. Farmers didn't have much choice of carriers. If they were dissatisfied with rates charged by the Union Pacific, they could hardly move tons of wheat hundreds of miles to the area served by the Northern Pacific. And railroads charged "whatever the freight would bear."

This price gouging gave rise to the Granger movement that began to agitate for government controls over the rates charged by the railroads. The states attempted to regulate the railroads, but their jurisdiction ended at the state line, and all of the major farm-to-market railroads were interstate.

Finally succumbing to public pressure, Congress in 1887 enacted the Interstate Commerce Act. In doing so, lawmakers did something unprecedented: They created an agency with powers to make rules that had the force of law. They had taken a sliver of legislative power granted to Congress under the Constitution and conferred it on a government agency of its own creation, the Interstate Commerce Commission.

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Could Congress have tackled the job of regulating the railroads without creating the commission? It could, if its members knew anything about railroads, such as what constituted a fair return for the railroads and what was a just rate for shippers to pay.

The commission stood alone as a kind of bureaucratic oddity until 1906, when another regulatory agency was created again in response to public pressure. This was the Food and Drug Administration founded amid popular revulsion at the lack of sanitary controls in the meat packinghouses, as revealed in Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle. The meat packers themselves came to see the need for regulation when European countries began banning imports of American meat. Here again, state regulation would have been inadequate because the meat products were sold throughout the country.

The FDA was also empowered to police over-the-counter remedies that were often bogus concoctions of alcohol and food coloring. The same logic that lay behind the creation of the commerce commission persuaded Congress to set up the FDA: House members and senators were ill-equipped to go snooping around pharmacies and slaughterhouses. As the Progressive movement gained steam under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, so did the pressure to regulate parts of the economy previously operating in alaissez faire environment.

On occasion, it was an industry that demanded to be regulated. The advent of commercial radio stations led to a kind of anarchy over space on the spectrum. The signals of rival stations overlapped and created a kind of electronic Tower of Babel, and the industry called in the federal government to restore order. Regulatory power was given originally to the secretary of Commerce but was later shifted to the independent Federal Communications Commission.

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President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal unleashed a flood of new regulatory agencies, ranging from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the National Labor Relations Board. The Democratic Party came to be identified with the use of regulatory agencies, which has caused critics on the right to crusade for their abolition.

Agencies are occasionally merged or even abolished. The commerce commission, which started it all, was abolished in 1996. But such outright agency eliminations are rare because they develop constituencies of supporters in the public, in Congress and in the industries they regulate. Federal regulation, especially when it sets industry standards, can have the effect of eliminating firms that cannot meet the standards. Ironically, then, regulation can limit competition. Try starting a new automobile company or a new airline.

Abolition of the agencies is probably beyond Bannon's power, but they can be crippled simply by failing to fill vacancies or drastically cutting budgets. Bear in mind, however, that while people might want government to get off their backs, eventually they will demand to be remounted.

Ross K. Baker is a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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