Donald Trump and Elon Musk must be accomplishing something, given the howls coming out of the Washington establishment. Could Trump actually be making good on his 2016 promise to drain the swamp?
Still, I am not sanguine about his ultimate success.
The root problem will still be there no matter how much fiscal mismanagement DOGE finds.
The problem is Congress and its absolute unwillingness to reform itself. It can’t even pass an annual budget with continuing resolutions ad nauseam. After DOGE goes out of business and Trump decamps from the White House, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be back to business as usual in those hallowed halls. Since it is evident to me that Congress is incapable of serious reform, I feel duty-bound to offer a solution that would outlive this and the next administrations. I won’t claim an Isaac Newton moment when the apple fell from the tree but a simple solution suddenly appeared like those lightbulbs going off above a character in the old comic strips. With no disrespect of Jonathan Swift intended, I would like to offer the following immodest proposal.
The key is a single word, “sunset.”
First, Congress must pass an overarching law that requires all future laws to contain a sunset provision, the legislative equivalent of a “use by” date. To be truly effective, the sunset limit should be no more than 10 years, long enough for the benefits of, or damage caused by, the law to be measurable.
The same sunset requirement should be legislated for all executive orders and administrative rule-making.
Maybe this doesn’t seem necessary for executive
orders as our recent presidents have gleefully voided the policy-based orders of their predecessor while heaping on dozens of their own.
A second overarching law to be passed is to retroactively amend all current laws and regulations to apply a 10-year sunset to them.
There are 60,000 pages in the U.S. Code, the compilation of all laws passed by Congress and still in effect, and an additional 180,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations, all the rules promulgated by federal departments and agencies.
A commission, or several of them, would be tasked with reviewing all quartermillion pages of this stuff to prioritize what should be addressed immediately by Congress. The DOGE example is useful, demonstrating how outside expertise can cut through the special interests that are entrenched on Capitol Hill.
These two laws are intentionally draconian in scope.
The task at first blush seems gargantuan and doomed to failure. But remember that this is the age of artificial intelligence. All these documents are digitized and therefore open to computerized searching and analysis.
This would be a productive application of AI.
What chance does my immodest proposal for sunsetting all federal legislation and rulemaking have?
I would expect none at all, but then after writing this column I learned from Third District Congressman Marlin Stutz that he just introduced a bill to require sunsetting in new legislation.
His objective is more modest than mine but then he is constrained by politics, defined by Otto von Bismarck as the art of the possible. I am not so constrained.
What I can do, though, is talk about this with people who have more influence than I have. This will start with my monthly Socratic discussion group, assuming I can get this on our 2025 agenda. The Socratic method is ideal for examining off-the-wall ideas like mine. Its structured questioning is designed to poke holes in poorly formed opinions and thereby either discard them or strengthen their logic.
That’s the best I can hope for.
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