The greatest threat to America is the administrative state and the politicians in both parties who have learned to exploit it. Every crisis becomes a justification to reduce individual liberty.
Every emergency becomes a reason to seize more control over the economy. Every disagreement becomes an opportunity to pit Americans against each other and to silence those who dare question it.
A government that operates this way has severed itself from the consent of the governed. It answers to no voter and has no right to govern.
For the last 30 years, the administrative state has infected political, economic and social life in America. It is destructive. And it was built that way on purpose.
Three things matter to Americans and to the success of this country: security, individual liberty, and the opportunity to pursue economic prosperity. That is the whole bargain.
Capitalism fits within it — but only as a means, not an end. It thrives only when individuals feel secure and free to pursue their own ambitions, not suffocated by the government they empowered to protect them.
When that balance holds, Americans are free to build, to earn, and to create. Security enables liberty. Liberty enables opportunity. And the opportunity to prosper under this bargain is the American promise. The administrative state is destroying all of it.
The Founders knew this danger. They had lived under a king whose Star Chamber wrote the rules, ran the prosecution, and rendered the verdict — answerable only to the Crown. They wrote the Constitution to bury that model forever.
Wilson and the Progressives dug it back up — and built the administrative state. They did not merely disagree with the Founders. They repudiated them.
Wilson called the Constitution a “bygone device” to be discarded and told Americans to skip the Declaration’s preface — the part where Jefferson established government exists to secure individual rights. The Progressives ripped policymaking power from the people and handed it to unaccountable technocratic elites.
Madison warned in Federalist No. 47: concentrating legislative, executive, and judicial powers in the same hands is the very definition of tyranny. Congress ignored him.
Article I vests all legislative power in Congress — not agencies, not career staff. When Congress passes a vague statute and lets regulators write every meaningful detail, it has not delegated. It has abdicated and handed the pen to unelected bureaucrats who adopt rules that bind every American. I made that argument before Congress this February. The result is a permanent class of federal employees who cannot be fired. They resist presidents who threaten their power and entrench themselves under those who expand government.
That culture has a price. Federal agencies win roughly 92% of cases before their own judges and almost none in an independent court.
Michelle Cochran spent seven years fighting an SEC-hired judge at her own expense before the agency surrendered. George Jarkesy spent fourteen years before the Supreme Court ruled he had a constitutional right to a jury trial.
The government’s resources are limitless. Most Americans’ are not. That is not a flaw in the system. It is the system.
Here is what nobody in Washington wants to say out loud: the Constitution created three branches of government. Independent agencies exist outside all three. They exercise executive power but answer to no president. They adjudicate disputes but answer to no court. They write rules but answer to no legislature. They answer to themselves. There is no constitutional basis for that. There never was.
The Supreme Court has finally had enough. Loper Bright ended judicial deference to agencies interpreting their own authority. Corner Post ruled that the clock on challenging a bad regulation does not start until you are harmed by it. Jarkesy restored the right to a jury trial.
Now, Trump v. Slaughter asks whether agency heads can be shielded from presidential removal entirely.
The answer should be obvious. Unaccountable power is not governance. It is coercion. The administrative state was built on that truth deliberately, by people who considered it a feature, not a flaw.
The Supreme Court is dismantling what Wilson built and returning self-government to the American people. This country turns 250 in July, and the Founders’ bargain deserves to greet that anniversary intact.
Christopher A. Iacovella is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Securities Association.
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