RUTHFULLY YOURS

The new president threw official Washington into a spinning tizzy when on Tuesday his Office of Management and Budget announced that he was temporarily freezing $3 trillion in “all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance.” The executive order was blocked by a federal judge and the administration rescinded the memo. But the message was sent. This president is serious about removing the dead wood from the federal machine.

An interesting secondary effect of the order was to show just how dependent politicians, party and government functionaries, institutions, and far too many private individuals have become on the federal trough. They reacted as if the world were ending.

The 47th president is different, different from the 45th, and different from every president going back to the 19th century. His only rivals would be Calvin Coolidge, a zealous advocate of limited government, and Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric about pulling back government was spot on even if his execution wasn’t always in line with his lofty goals.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said Trump’s first week in office “totally reset my conception of what’s possible, in two wholly different dimensions.”

The headline on law professor and Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds’ recent New York Post op-ed declared that Trump’s “unprecedented and swift action … has reset the national mood.”

Sean Davis, co-founder and chief executive of the Fedearalist, tweeted Tuesday that “Trump has done more to save this country in the last week than every elected Republican before him combined did over the last 30 years. And at a far greater personal cost to himself and his family.”

Writing in Blaze Media, Christopher Bedford argued that “Trump’s remaking of the federal government isn’t just softening the palette; it’s a full-blown color revolution in how the federal government operates — and if successful, it will change everything.”

Having learned from his first term, when bureaucracy lifers would just ignore his instructions, Trump has also suspended as many as 60 senior officials within the Agency for International Development “identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders and the mandate from the American people.“

Roughly 60 out of a workforce of more than 3 million is almost hardly worth mentioning. But a clear message has been sent – and boosted by Trump’s offer to buy out all federal employees who would leave their jobs by Feb. 6. The Associated Press called it “an unprecedented move to shrink the U.S. government at breakneck speed.” Every believer in the virtues of limited government and every apostle of expanded liberty should rejoice.

As it turns out, the right people are in a panic over Trump’s effort to return sanity to Washington.

• The politicians who crave power and obtain and hold it by using the federal fisc and the power of legislation to buy votes.

• The vandals of the administrative state that has become the fourth and most powerful (and vindictive) branch of government – and is, in the words of our friend Steven Hayward, a “partisan instrument of the Democratic Party” rather than the “professional class of neutral civil servants” it was intended to be.

• The media fabulists, who are also partisan instruments of the Democrats, and, like the party they serve and protect, unable to conceive of life with limits on government.

Our founders did not intend for their countrymen to live under the boot, nor be dependent upon, the federal government. Of course, this is what Washington’s establishment, primarily under the control of Democrats, wants. Now we have a president who not only sees it the other way, he’s making long overdue changes.