As the constitutional framers foresaw, a continually expand government renders effective democratic control almost impossible.  At times, even the political left has acknowledged this fact. 

When news emerged in 2013 that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted conservative groups, longtime Obama advisor David Axelrod defended the president’s ignorance of the scandal by saying, “Part of being president is that there is so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast.” 

This statement presents perhaps the strongest argument that government has become too big.  Even an administration that actively expanded the federal government to its largest size in U.S. history as of that date, admitted that it was too big for the president to know what was going on with it.

The push for a more expansive government characterizes the past century of American liberalism.  A brief respite from this push may have occurred during the 1990s, when President Clinton, in response to Republicans gaining control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years, declared “the era of big government” to be over.

However, liberals soon took up the cause of big government with renewed enthusiasm during the Obama and Biden presidencies. A somewhat surprising aspect of this push is that government expansion seems to be advocated regardless of the particular purposes of the particular government action or agency. 

Take, for instance, the 2015 debates over the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank.  Democrats strongly supported continued funding of the Bank, even though the Bank primarily served the interests of a very small number of large, multinational corporations.

Despite their outcry against corporate welfare to large corporations, Democrats defended a federal agency that helped selected American corporations compete in foreign markets by providing taxpayer-backed loan guarantees to their foreign customers. The Bank’s funding benefits flowed overwhelmingly to a small number of U.S. corporations that spent heavily on federal lobbyists. 

Nearly a third of all Bank financing benefitted Boeing alone. Indeed, the Bank dedicated twice as much funding just to the sales of Boeing aircraft as it did to the exports of every small business in America combined.

As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama denounced the Bank as “little more than a fund for corporate welfare.” But as president, Obama signed the Bank’s reauthorization bill, despite Republican opposition. It was as if Democrats strove to maintain government’s “space” within society, regardless of the purpose or activity of that government.

A common criticism of a continually expanding government focuses on the inflationary and deficit-increasing aspects of that expansion, as were voiced in the critiques over President Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act and the Build Back Better Act.

However, another criticism that may be equally powerful, yet perhaps less often asserted, involves the “crowding out” effect of a growing government.

The wider the space occupied by government, the narrower the space available to non-governmental actors. As government expands, it can crowd out the public area available to private actors.  For instance, as government takes over social welfare functions, it makes it more difficult for religious and charitable institutions to operate in that arena.

Consider, for instance, the Obama-era case involving the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic order of nuns operating housing facilities for the elderly poor.  As a Catholic order, the Little Sisters had a religious objection to contraceptive use. 

However, the Affordable Care Act required employers to include contraceptive use in their employee health plans.  Thus, because of the ACA, the Little Sisters were crowded out of the social welfare area, left with the choice of either violating their religious beliefs or continuing in their social welfare mission of helping the elderly poor.

Consequently, expansion of government does not just inflate the public budget, increase the deficit, and fuel inflation; but in recent years, another side-effect has come to light — an effect that actually distorts or handicaps the integrity of government. The left has steered ballooning government agencies toward purposes other than the primary functions those agencies were charged with pursuing.

This phenomenon became especially evident during the recent California wildfires.

Very quickly, evidence came to light that city and state government agencies were poorly equipped or prepared to deal with the crisis.  Water reservoirs had been allowed to run dry; government officials were ignorant of whether fire hydrants were connected to any workable water source; fire departments were under-staffed and unprepared to fight the fires.

Many on the left blamed any criticism of government performance on racism and sexism; others defended the agencies on the ground that, under DEI policies, the agencies had become more diverse than ever before.  It was as if the whole function of government was to be diverse bodies. 

But a fire department functions to put out fires, not simply to be a diverse collection of individuals.  Diversity should result from nondiscriminatory employment practices; but diversity in itself is not the prime function of a governmental fire department.

A similar lesson arose out of FEMA’s 2024 much-criticized response to Hurricane Helene. Critics charged that the agency’s slow and inadequate response stemmed from its over-emphasis on DEI in its training and staffing, rather than on actual emergency measures.

Likewise, critics of the U.S. military’s recruitment, retention and readiness declines point to an over-emphasis on DEI. But again, the military serves to protect national security through military strength, not to simply constitute a government body possessing a particular diversity quotient.

The more government has grown, both in size and scope of activity, the more it has deviated beyond original purposes and into other politically-motivated purposes. Government agencies have turned away from the goals of the civil service reform movement of the late nineteenth century. That movement sought to insulate government civil service from the influences of partisan politics.

Contrary to this goal, government agencies and employees have now infused partisan purposes into their work. During Hurricane Helene, FEMA employees made decisions on giving aid based on the political preferences of particular storm victims.

In a poll released on January 13, just days before the presidential inauguration, nearly half of all federal government managers stated that they planned to politically oppose the incoming administration. Thus, government agencies and employees have become their own political force.

The vast increase in the size and scope of government has led to this distortion of government.  It is a rule of nature that when things grow beyond their intended or workable size, they begin to distort and mutate.

An expansive government is not just bloating the federal deficit and crowding out non-governmental actors, it is turning toward actions and purposes that detract from its charged functions. The bigger it grows, the more it deviates from its charged assignments; hence, the more incapable it becomes of serving those charged assignments.

This phenomenon poses a grave risk for a democratic society, in which the non-government citizens possess a constitutional right and duty to direct the activities of their government.  With government agencies inculcating political motivation unto themselves to then veer into new priorities, democratic accountability becomes even more difficult.              

Patrick Garry is a professor at the University of South Dakota School of Law.