These Days Before the Vote: Limited Government

Whitewater, Wis. — This increasingly cloudy Monday evening in Wisconsin continues These Days Before the Vote, a series addressing, each day before the November election, a principle or position on which our liberal democratic tradition rests.

Many Americans would define libertarianism only as a political philosophy of small government, and yet small government is simply an important condition of the individual rights, the individual liberty, that is the first principle of libertarianism. One favors small government because one believes in individual rights. Officials must have a strong, credible justification for interfering in the lives of individuals and the private associations those individuals form.

Government action, when necessary, must be evenly exercised without prejudice against individuals different by race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or orientation. In this way, government must recognize a fundamental equality between all citizens, an equal moral worth of all. A libertarianism that holds some naturally inferior to others is no libertarianism at all — it's a herrenvolk state by a more beguiling name.

Trump, often acting through executive order as though a foreign ruler, shows the error in believing actions to reduce government spending are truly a limited government effort. Trump and Musk's DOGE, the supposed Department of Government Efficiency, was neither a department nor efficient nor a normal process under law to achieve limited government. See Exec. Order No. 14,158, Establishing and Implementing the President's "Department of Government Efficiency," 90 Fed. Reg. 8441 (Jan. 29, 2025).

DOGE did nothing to reduce federal spending. See Alex Nowrasteh and Krit Chanwong, DOGE Produced the Largest Peacetime Workforce Cut on Record, but Spending Kept Rising, Cato at Liberty, December 19, 2025.

The critical problem for libertarians or anyone who wants a smaller government: Accomplishing a goal in a law-abiding society, including reducing the size of government, cannot be done in a principled yet simultaneously reckless, lawless way.

Individual liberty includes rights of the individual to due process and privacy, from other individuals, from government, and from addicted and maladjusted men whom government's autocratic leader deputizes for a rampage through archives.

In this, a libertarian as libertarian should be in agreement with Alan Charles Raul, associate White House counsel under President Ronald Reagan, general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget under Reagan and President George H.W. Bush, board secretary of the Society for the Rule of Law, and lecturer at Harvard Law School. Raul has written persuasively against DOGE:

What is not debatable, however, is that Congress has not authorized this radical overhaul, and the protocols of the Constitution do not permit statutorily mandated agencies and programs to be transformed — or reorganized out of existence — without congressional authorization.

The Constitution is well known to interpose meaningful checks and balances and a separation of powers among the responsibilities of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. It is also well understood that the respective branches’ powers and duties intersect and overlap. Fundamentally, however, all legislative power belongs to Congress, and executive power to the president. The judiciary steps in when the parameters of shared authority get complicated or confusing and constitutional lines are crossed.

The radical reorganization now underway is not just footfaulting over procedural lines; it is shattering the fundamental checks and balances of our constitutional order. The DOGE process, if that is what it is, mocks two basic tenets of our government: that we are a nation of laws, not men, and that it is Congress which controls spending and passes legislation. The president must faithfully execute Congress’s laws and manage the executive agencies consistent with the Constitution and lawmakers’ appropriations — not by any divine right or absolute power.

See Alan Charles Raul, Why DOGE is unconstitutional ('Trump is acting extra-constitutionally. Only Congress or the Supreme Court can stop him'), February 11, 2025.

DOGE was no worthy campaign for limited government — it was the act utilitarianism of an autocrat, disregarding individual rights, replacing them with that senescent king's preferences and biases set loose in the person of an addled businessman and his vulgar band.

Why do so many Americans reject libertarianism even in these days when liberty is threatened? Concerning DOGE's supposed drive for limited government: our fellow citizens are not act utilitarians and are rightly opposed to those who are.

We can only creditably and credibly advance the good cause of limited government through fair, rational policies under law.