Administering America.

• Author: Marini, John
• Position: National Affairs

AS SEEN in the recent government shutdown and the showdown over the debt limit--the latest in a long series of such crises in Washington--the Federal budget stands at the heart of American politics. With few exceptions, the budget has formed the battleground between the political branches of the government--the Executive and the Legislative--in every Administration since Pres. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. That starting point is not a coincidence: the Great Society marked the beginning of an expansion of the Federal government and a centralization of political and administrative power in Washington that long had been the domain of local and state governments.

In addition to destroying the fabric of federalism, this centralization had the effect of undermining the separation of powers, making it difficult--if not impossible--for Congress, the president, and the bureaucracy to function amicably in pursuit of a national interest. What we have seen in subsequent decades is the steady expansion of a modern administrative state that distinctively is American in that it coexists with a limited government Constitution.

In the U.S., the administrative state traces its origins to the Progressive movement. Inspired by the theories of the German political philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Progressives like Pres. Woodrow Wilson believed that the erection of the modern state marked an "end of history," a point at which there no longer is any need for conflict over fundamental principles. Politics at this point would give way to administration, and administration becomes the domain not of partisans, but of neutral and highly trained "experts."

America's Founders shared a radically different understanding, an understanding based not on history but on nature. James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers that factionalism is "sown in the nature of man"; thus, thus there always will be political conflict--which, at its starkest, is a conflict between justice, the highest human aspiration concerning politics, and its opposite, tyranny.

This conflict between justice and tyranny occurs in every political order, the Founders believed, because it occurs in every human soul. It is human nature itself, therefore, that makes it necessary to place limits on the power of government.

Progressive leaders were openly hostile to the Constitution not only because it placed limits on government, but because it provided almost no role for the Federal government in the area of administration. The separation of powers of government into three branches--Executive, Legislative, and Judicial--inhibited the creation of a unified will and made it impossible to establish a technical administrative apparatus to carry out that will. Determined to overcome this separation, one of the chief reforms promoted by early Progressives was an Executive budget system--a budget that would allow Progressive presidents to pursue the will of a national majority and establish a nonpartisan bureaucracy to carry it out.

Congress initially was reluctant to give presidents the authority to formulate budgets, partly because it infringed on Congress' constitutional prerogative--but also because it still was understood at the time that the separation of powers stood as a barrier to tyranny and as a protection of individual freedom. Eventually, however, Congress' resistance weakened.

For several decades after a Federal budget process was put in place, a consensus concerning the size and purposes of the Federal government...