Reagan: It’s time to chain saw the bureaucrats

Since when did bureaucrats become a victim class?

The answer to that one is easy — as soon as Donald Trump began his crusade to reduce their numbers.

Before Trump and his chainsaw-waving new sidekick Elon Musk began attacking our nation’s bloated federal workforce, there were about 3 million people supposedly working hard for American taxpayers.

They’re not all bureaucrats — not all overpaid, under-worked paper-pushers in tiny offices doing unnecessary work — and the number of federal workers has been stuck around 3 million for decades.

Governments large and small obviously need some employees to do things like keeping tabs on who is paying their taxes and making sure their too many laws and excessive regulations are being followed.

But from the recent cries of Democrats and what’s left of the incredibly shrinking liberal media, you’d think every single federal worker is vital for the proper functioning of America.

You’d also think every park ranger, IRS agent and Department of Education bureaucrat was a tip-top employee whose daily work ethic was stronger than Trump’s or Musk’s.

In fact, as my father knew, bureaucracies are worse than Dracula. They produce nothing of value to the economy, never die and grow bigger and stronger, no matter who is president.

When my father once said, “The closest thing to eternal life is a government program,” he was thinking of bureaucracies.

What Trump and Musk are doing is treated by the liberal media like some radical MAGA policy, but it’s not.

Until Trump’s attack on government waste and fraud miraculously turned bureaucrats into human sacred cows overnight, even Democrats understood that bloated bureaucracies were bad.

Though Trump’s deranged critics in the media don’t know it or have conveniently forgotten it, in the early 1990s the tag team of Bill Clinton and Al Gore made a huge deal out of cutting back government waste and inefficiency when they took office.

Clinton’s “Reinventing Government” crusade did work — for a while.

By 1999, it reduced the federal workforce by 339,000 positions. You can see young Bill and young Al announcing their get-tough plans on YouTube. They sound like my father.

Unlike the progressive partisans of today, the mainstream liberal media of the 1990s didn’t attack Clinton.

The New York Times didn’t write editorials calling him a heartless Southern heel and the big networks didn’t send TV crews out across America to interview the innocent laid off bureaucrats with big mortgages who were being “victimized.”

By the end of Clinton’s second term, the federal workforce was still about the same size as it had been. Barack Obama made similar promises about cutting waste, etc., etc. — promises he never kept.

Since then, the federal government has not been cut, streamlined or made more efficient with things like updated computers for the IRS or air traffic controllers who reportedly still use pencils and paper. AI? Are you joking?

Democrats and the dying liberal media hate Trump and Musk so much they now defend bureaucrats, love the IRS and support not-very liberal things like government censorship.

Last week a small crowd of over-emotional liberals who apparently used to watch Joy Reid every day showed the country how out of touch “progressives” are.

A few hundred — probably what’s left of MSNBC’s core audience — were on the National Mall screaming and holding up posters attacking Trump and Musk as tyrants and Nazis.

From their deranged point of view, attacking government waste and fraud and cutting government bureaucracy is now a war crime.

Let’s hope Trump and DOGE succeed in shrinking government in a serious and lasting way and figure out how to save a trillion or two bucks a year. The historical record is not good, unfortunately, which is one reason we have a national debt of $35 trillion.

We the people have been the victims of government for decades. It’s time government feels the pain. Now the bureaucracy is the victim of DOGE. What comes around, goes around. God bless DOGE.

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.