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Has President Trump suckered Democrats and the Deep State into a trap that will enable a radical downsizing of the federal bureaucracy? In only 5 more days of the already-“longest government shutdown in history” (25 days and counting, as of today), a heretofore obscure threshold will be reached, enabling permanent layoffs of bureaucrats furloughed 30 days or more.

Federal agencies, led by Labor and Health and Human Services, are cutting Obama-era regulations and saving money faster than demanded by President Trump, according to a new report. And as a result, the administration is expected to easily meet the president’s order to cut at least two old regulations for every new one issued and cut the costs of regulations. “With less than two months remaining in FY 2018, the Trump administration is well on its way to surpassing its regulatory budget goals,” said the new report from American Action Forum, which charts federal regulations. “Collectively, executive agencies subject to...

Trump is draining the swamp —Rebuilding government may be impossible In the 2013 novel “A Delicate Truth,” John le Carré presents the “deep state” as a moneyed, cultured élite — the “non-governmental insiders from banking, industry, and commerce” whose access to information allows them to rule in secret. Trump’s conception is quite different. A real-estate baron, Trump is at war with the clerks — the apparatchiks who, he claims, are seeking to nullify the election by denying the prerogatives of his Administration. This attack on “bureaucracy” is really an attack on the State Department, the intelligence community and ordinary bureaucrats...

This isn’t getting anywhere near the same amount of oxygen in the news cycle as the Net Neutrality story, but it certainly should be. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) under the tenure of Barack Obama was busy handing out all sorts of goodies to the unions which finance most Democratic political campaigns. One particular burr under the collective, conservative saddle was a new “reinterpretation” of rules regarding the obligations of larger corporations who authorize the operation of franchises under their name. I wrote about this back in 2015 when the rule was originally finalized and it was a deplorable...

The Environmental Protection Agency has shrunk considerably since Scott Pruitt took over as administrator. In fact, the agency is back to President Reagan-era staff levels. Over 700 EPA personnel have either retired, quit, or taken voluntary buyouts since Pruitt took over...

The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to repeal net neutrality rules, over the objection of Democrats in Congress, Internet activists and online companies. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, and Commissioner Brendan Carr, all Republicans, supported the proposed rollback of the Obama-era rules. Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel opposed the change.

President Trump has slammed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a "total disaster" and rightly objects to a second leftist taking the place of outgoing leftwing director Richard Cordray. The battle is just the tip of the iceberg surrounding this federal agency that shouldn't even be there in the first place. What Trump is battling is an unaccountable agency run by the Democrats and for the Democrats with the aim of funding more Democrats. It's a shakedown racket targeting banks and other moneybags businesses based solely on the size of their assets to harvest from fines. It was never about...

'Doing better than Ronald Reagan' to cut rules! Under the Obama administration, the White House, the Department of Justice and other federal agencies repeatedly circumvented Congress by using guidance memos to create de facto regulations, changing laws without going through the review process. In less than a year, however, the Trump administration has dramatically scaled back government overreach, Merrill Matthews, a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation, told WND. “Guidance typically from the department means there is some question about how to do this, because of the way it was ambiguously written, so a federal agency would provide...

Buried in an otherwise-humdrum jobs report was the jaw-dropping pronouncement by the Department of Labor that mining jobs in America were up by 11,000 in March. Since the low point in October 2016, and following years of painful layoffs in the mining industry, the mining sector has added 35,000 jobs. What a turnaround. Liberals have been saying that Donald Trump was lying to the American people when he said that he could bring coal jobs back. Well, so far, he has delivered on his promise. There's more good news for the coal industry. Earlier this month, Peabody Energy — America's...

JUST IN President Donald J Trump signs repeal of Dodd Frank provision

In one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump effectively halted nearly $200 billion worth of regulations, according to a new analysis.President Trump has taken aggressive action to curb regulations in his first week, promising to cut 75 percent or "maybe more," and signing an executive order Monday to cut two regulations from the books when every new rule is introduced.The first move came in the form of a memo to all federal agencies from Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, freezing all recently finalized and pending regulations. The American Action Forum, a center-right policy institute, found the action resulted...

The former head of President Donald Trump’s transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday he expects the new administration to seek significant budget and staff cuts. Myron Ebell said in an interview with The Associated Press that Trump is likely to seek significant reductions to the agency’s workforce — currently about 15,000 employees nationwide. Ebell, who left the transition team last week, declined to discuss specific numbers of EPA staff that could be targeted for pink slips. Asked what he would personally like to see, however, Ebell said slashing the agency’s size by about half would be a...

Within four hours of becoming president of the United States, Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to limit immediately the effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) in ways that are revolutionary. With the stroke of a pen, the president assaulted the heart of the law that was the domestic centerpiece of his predecessor’s administration. How did this happen? How can a U.S. president, who took an oath to enforce the laws faithfully, gut one of them merely because he disagrees with it? Here is the back story. When ObamaCare went through Congress in 2010, all...

It was one of the promises Donald Trump made on the campaign trail which drew widespread approbation from conservatives while spurring varying degrees of either anger or depression among the beltway crowd. Trump said that it would be more of an ax than a new broom when it comes to the size of the federal workforce and he would freeze hiring if elected. The pledge led as many as a third of federal workers to say they might walk off the job if he was elected. So would he really do it? Well… that didn’t take long. (Government Executive)...

“I think as an industry, we’re excited about working together with the president and his administration on tax policies, on regulation, and on trade to really create a renaissance in American manufacturing,” Fields told reporters after the meeting, according to the Detroit News. Fields also praised Trump’s decision to kill former President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, pointing out that it failed to address currency manipulation.

Donald Trump is ready to take an ax to government spending. Staffers for the Trump transition team have been meeting with career staff at the White House ahead of Friday’s presidential inauguration to outline their plans for shrinking the federal bureaucracy, The Hill has learned. The changes they propose are dramatic. The departments of Commerce and Energy would see major reductions in funding, with programs under their jurisdiction either being eliminated or transferred to other agencies. The departments of Transportation, Justice and State would see significant cuts and program eliminations. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be privatized, while the...

With President-elect Trump promising to pay for his infrastructure and defense spending by defunding non-essential federal spending, one of the first programs on the block could be the almost $500 million spent on public broadcasting.Despite repeated efforts to kill federal funding of public broadcasting since Republicans won the House in 2010 and Presidential-nominee Mitt Romney made it a campaign promise in 2012, the U.S. Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education are spending $470.7 million in U.S. taxpayer cash to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) this year, which provides 15 percent of PBS television and 10 percent...

Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, sending the Republican businessman to the White House as the first president-elect with no prior experience in government or the military. Trump’s unexpected victory sent shockwaves throughout the country and the world, and will likely do the same for federal agencies. Trump has promised to institute a government wide hiring freeze on his first day in office and to change civil service laws to ease the firing of disloyal workers. Last month, just 65 percent of federal employees said they were committed to staying in their jobs if Trump were elected.

Donald Trump's transition team is preparing for the billionaire businessman to take over as commander in chief, they're ruffling a few feathers along the way. Scientific American reports Trump has selected climate change critic, Myron Ebell, to lead his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team. Ebell, who's the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, has been described by Newsweek as a fierce opponent of climate change, which the publisher calls “entirely at odds with scientific consensus.” David Goldston, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, explained that...

1. Reduce Bureaucratic Red Tape Republican leaders made it easier to do business in Indiana. They reduced bureaucratic red tape and eliminated many unnecessary regulations. Rather than burdening employers and trying to micromanage how businesses operate, Republicans put in place policies that have allowed our state to grow. 2. Balance the Budget The state put its fiscal house in order. Statehouse leaders cut government spending, balanced the budget, created a surplus, and built a near record reserve fund. Indiana earned a triple-A credit rating in 2010 and has maintained it ever since. These strategies help put the state in a...