“Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.” This quip was true when Milton Friedman said it many decades ago, and it’s gotten only more true over the many years that George Will has been quoting it in his columns and speeches.
The Constitution laid out a clear vision for the role of the federal government, one limited in both scope and power. Yet the government has drifted far from this blueprint. Departments and agencies now exist that would be unrecognizable to the Founders. Despite trillions in taxpayer dollars and decades—or even centuries—of meddling, these agencies have hampered economic growth, violated human rights, and eroded civil liberties. They have somehow managed to make air travel more frustrating, education more expensive, and drug enforcement more violent.
What follows is an idiosyncratic and nonexhaustive list of parts of the government that we could surely do without. We’ve left untouched some functions specifically mentioned in the Constitution (hello, United States Postal Service!) and confined our ire to the federal level. We also had to limit ourselves based on the amount of room in the magazine (there’s no love lost for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but we ran out of pages!), and we tried not to repeat arguments for abolition that we’ve made in the very recent past (we’d love to abolish NASA again, but we’ve made that case before). We aren’t making the case for anarchism (at least at the moment), merely hoping to highlight that the federal government was never supposed to be all things to all people. It’s time to take a hard look at which agencies have earned their place and which are long past their expiration date.
Sometimes reform is the answer. Victories for liberty can be and are achieved through gradual change. But sometimes, especially when it comes to bloated bureaucracies of dubious constitutionality, it’s better to simply abolish everything.
Read Reason‘s Abolish Everything issue:
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Abolish Everything.”
