ALEC & DOGE Aligned on Countering Executive Overreach

Minimizing government control has been an especially impactful message championed throughout the states in recent years—on the various campaign trails, from state legislators, and by voters themselves. More specifically, reducing the size and impact of the stifling government bureaucracy has been the shared focal priority. President-elect Trump’s recent victory sent a strong message throughout the country: efficient, accountable government is demanded.

Government accountability can be achieved through a variety of means. The strongest accountability mechanism built into our representative democracy is the democratic electorate itself. However, addressing problems associated with unelected officials requires more insight, understanding, and action in order to yield resolution.  What’s more, increasing efficiency efforts requires substantive issue-spotting, as well as sweeping structural and personnel change. This is precisely the task the incoming Trump administration seeks to take on via the establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE.

The private entity will likely function as an advisory body to the administration, providing reports and recommended action plans for agencies, department heads, Congress, or the President to implement. The mission? To reduce the inefficiencies and limit the power of the federal executive bureaucracy.

Reforming and striking various agency rules and regulations written by unelected bureaucrats is not only a priority of the incoming DOGE advisors, but also a long-desired first step to remedy the decades-long problem of executive overreach, plaguing both federal and state governments in the U.S. It is unclear exactly what the scope of DOGE’s advisory plans will be, given President Trump’s pledge to abolish the U.S. Department of Education during his campaign. Regardless, DOGE serves as a refreshing and special commitment from the prospective administration, leaving limited government, free-market thinkers excited about the future—particularly the ALEC members who compromise the recently launched ALEC Government Efficiency coalition, which meets monthly to share best practices and proven policies from the states to optimize all levels of government.

ALEC has led various efforts to tackle the challenges brought by executive bureaucrats for decades. For example, various regulatory reform initiatives, educating on the administrative state dilemma, reigning in the emergency powers of executive officials, enhancing rulemaking accountability through legislative reviews and gubernatorial approvals, and restructuring the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branches via administrative law judge and judicial deference reforms, have all been active pursuits of ALEC members in recent years, with several proposals achieving legislative success in 2024.

Most of these issues are tasked with addressing the problems created by the quasi-legislating of executive branch bureaucrats. For example, judicial deference—the doctrine which requires courts to defer to agency interpretations of the law when unclear (rather than allowing a court to exercise its exclusive interpretive role)—creates a massive power grab for agency rule-makers who know that courts might uphold their interpretation of the law.

Emergency powers of the state, when left unchecked and unclear as to how long they can last, can lead to an abuse of authority by the executive branch; much like the variety of emergency restrictions imposed on state economies and small businesses throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, often done through sweeping executive orders under the authority of governors’ emergency powers.

Administrative law courts function as procedural adjudicatory bodies within the executive, to enforce regulations created by the executive, often for the benefit of the executive—all while delaying people’s substantive legal recourse through an actual independent and separate adjudicator (the judiciary). And requiring the legislature and/or the governor of a state to approve proposed rules by agencies before they are published clearly puts a massive component of lawmaking authority back in the hands of elected leaders.

The spirit behind the larger DOGE effort is powerful: DOGE is a manifestation of the philosophies which guide and motivate limited government advocates. Limiting government means limiting its authority and impact on people’s lives because of the understanding that government authority can (and ultimately will) be abused to negatively impact marketplaces, waste resources, and infringe on individuals’ liberties. DOGE is a recognition of that very a problem at the federal level, but also a serious commitment to move forward with tackling it, rather than merely criticizing the status quo. What better way to advocate for small, local, limited government than by voluntarily organizing a private entity tasked with cutting the very functions, outcomes, and size of the executive bureaucracy altogether?

As the incoming administration gets its footing, the ALEC Government Efficiency coalition is here to help supply DOGE, administration leaders, and all elected representatives with the most effective and efficient administrative reforms implemented by the states. Federalism serves as more than a necessary structural division of government power: it also enables the states to function as “laboratories of democracy” for other jurisdictions to learn from. For some time now, the states have experimented in passing numerous reforms challenging executive branch power-grabs and implementing better separations of powers practices. The incoming Trump administration and 119^th Congress will have many successful experiment results to learn from as they strive forward with this incredibly important opportunity to limit government power and inefficient practices in substantive and meaningful ways.