A Government for the People: Reflections on 250 Years and the Architecture of a Renewed Republic
Let me begin by stating the obvious, and that is, any claim that a single administration, in any era, most completely embodies the founding vision of the American republic is, by its nature, an overstatement. History is too complicated and the fact of the matter is that no president has ever governed in pure philosophical alignment with the ideals of 1776, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. I want to be honest about that at the outset, because the argument I am going to make depends on nuance rather than hero worship, and because the distinction between hyperbole and insight matters enormously when we are standing, as we now are, at the threshold of the nation’s 250 th year.
Because having said all of that, I find myself arriving at a conclusion that I suspect a great many Americans across a wide and genuinely diverse range of backgrounds have quietly arrived at on their own, which is that the current administration in Washington, imperfect and turbulent as it often is, has come closer than anything in modern memory to restoring the original animating purpose of the American government. And I’m not talking about the mythology of that purpose, but the substance of it. The founding fathers did not create a government to manage an empire, but rather they did not create it to administer the ambitions of a professional class. They created it, with remarkable clarity and at no small personal risk, to serve the ordinary people who had taken up arms against a distant and unaccountable sovereign power. Now whether the present administration achieves that goal in every respect is a question worth asking, but there are many who believe that it has reoriented the terms of the argument itself, and brought the common citizen back to the center of the political enterprise.
It is worth spending a moment with the founding documents themselves, not as sacred texts to be cited reverently without analysis, but as political philosophy to be understood in context. The Declaration of Independence is not, at its core, a list of grievances. Thomas Jefferson’s famous formulation that governments are instituted among men to secure unalienable rights, and that they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is not a preamble to the real argument… it is the entire argument. And the Constitution that was created was an attempt to build institutional machinery capable of honoring that theory without collapsing into either anarchy or tyranny, which the founders knew from experience could arrive wearing the same face.
What strikes any careful student of that period is how deeply suspicious the founding generation was of concentrated, distant, and self-perpetuating power. James Madison’s argument in Federalist No. 51 that ambition must be made to counteract ambition was not an observation about human nature in the abstract, but a direct response to what they had watched the British Parliament become. The grievances in the Declaration are all, in their various ways, complaints about government that has lost its connection to the people it was meant to serve. Taxation without representation, the quartering of troops, the obstruction of justice and the removal of local authority. Every one of those complaints is, at its core, a complaint about a governing class that has forgotten who it works for.
The early Congresses, whatever their significant moral failures regarding slavery and the treatment of indigenous peoples, operated with a lean frugality that reflected this philosophy. The federal government was small and its reach was limited, but its purpose was to create the conditions under which free people could build their own lives, not to direct those lives from a distant capital staffed by experts who had never met the people they were regulating. Alexander Hamilton’s financial vision introduced permanent tensions that have never been fully resolved, but even Hamilton understood that the purpose of national power was to strengthen the republic as a whole, not to entrench a managerial elite that would outlast any single administration and answer to no election.
What happened, across the span of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, was a slow but almost total inversion of that original design. Bureaucracy grew not because the American people demanded it, but because it grew its own institutional momentum. The professional and credentialed class that staffed these institutions developed a set of interests distinct from the people they were supposed to serve, and a language of expertise that effectively excluded the ordinary citizen from the conversation. And the founders’ sovereign, the people, became a constituency to be managed rather than a principal to be obeyed.
This is not a purely partisan critique, it is a structural one, and it is a critique that, for most of the past several decades, neither party had any serious interest in making, because both parties were, in different ways, comfortable with the administrative state and the donor and institutional relationships it sustained.
What President Donald Trump has accomplished, beginning with his first campaign and continuing through a second term that carries far more institutional weight than his first, was something that had not happened in any memorable way since at least the early days of the Reagan revolution, and even then the comparison has limits because Reagan’s challenge to the administrative state was constrained by the political realities of divided government and by an internationalist wing of his own party that never fully bought the program. Trump’s challenge was different in nature. It was not primarily ideological in the conventional sense. It was functional, and it asked the most basic question any democratic government must be able to answer: Who does it actually serve?
The answer that emerged from polling place after polling place in 2024 was that a substantial majority of the American people felt the answer was not them. Not the steelworker in Pennsylvania whose plant had moved offshore, not the small farmer in Iowa whose costs had been driven up by regulations written for industrial agriculture, certainly not the parent in Arizona whose child had watched a school system more interested in its own institutional priorities than in basic reading and mathematics, and not even the veteran in North Carolina who had waited years for benefits from a department that employed thousands of administrators. The 2024 election was not, in my reading, primarily a cultural referendum, but rather it was a political accountability verdict, and what it returned was a governing coalition that, whatever its sharp edges and its considerable controversies, has spent the better part of the past year and a half actually attempting to reverse the drift of fifty years of administrative accumulation and reconnect the federal government to the people from whom it nominally derives its authority.
President Trump himself is the proper starting point for any serious analysis of what has happened, not because of the cult of personality that his critics correctly identify and his supporters sometimes incautiously cultivate, but because the policy architecture of this period is genuinely his. The border was secured not because a committee recommended it but because a president decided it would be, and directed the full weight of executive authority toward that end. The trade posture was reoriented not because economists had reached a consensus but because a president concluded that the consensus had been wrong, and that the workers who bore the cost of that wrong deserved someone willing to say so out loud and act on it. And the energy production expansion, the renegotiation of international relationships, the challenge to the credentialing class within the federal workforce: all of these trace back to a governing philosophy that is recognizably Jeffersonian in its suspicion of distant power, recognizably Jacksonian in its populist energy, and recognizably American in its insistence that the purpose of government is to serve the people who live under it, not the people who administer it.
The founders, I would argue, would have recognized something in this. Not in every detail, or in every tone or tactic, but in recognizing that the government has grown too large, too distant, too self-serving, and the remedy is to pull it back toward its proper function. Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to James Madison in 1787 that he liked a little rebellion now and then. While the current moment is not exactly that type of rebellion, it is a sustained reclamation project, and for these reasons, the founders would have understood the impulse perfectly.
Now no president operates alone, and the governing coalition that has assembled around the Trump administration in the 119th Congress represents something worth examining seriously rather than dismissing along predictable partisan lines.
Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana has operated in conditions of extraordinary difficulty, holding together a caucus with margins so thin that any defection is a potential crisis, and yet has managed to keep the legislative agenda moving in ways that earlier thin-majority Congresses conspicuously failed to do. His background as a constitutional lawyer informs a legislative philosophy that takes seriously the limits of federal authority and the prerogatives of the states, a disposition that places him squarely within the founding tradition even when it creates friction with executive ambitions. The governing challenge he faces is real, as a speaker who can only afford to lose two votes on any party-line bill must rely more on persuasion than command, which is, not incidentally, closer to how the founders imagined the legislative process working than the whip-driven party discipline that characterized recent decades.
Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma, presiding over the House Appropriations Committee (HAC), has pursued what his colleagues describe as a restoration of regular order, the practice of passing actual appropriations bills through the committee process rather than lurching from continuing resolution to omnibus package, a dysfunction that has characterized federal budgeting for years and that effectively removed Congress from meaningful oversight of federal spending. When Rep. Cole and his colleagues moved billions in spending cuts through the appropriations process and produced full-year funding bills rather than emergency patches, they were doing something that both parties had failed to do for a very long time.
Likewise, Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, deputy chairman of the HAC and chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs, shepherded an appropriations measure through the process that cut the relevant allocation by sixteen percent while maintaining robust commitments to key allies and counterterrorism priorities. His argument, echoing Rep. Cole’s, is that spending discipline is not cruelty but stewardship, and that the federal government’s obligation is to spend the people’s money effectively. Of course, that framing would not have seemed unusual to the early Congress, which understood that a blank check to any agency is a failure of that obligation regardless of which party holds the majority.
In the Senate, the figure who most demands attention, and who most rewards it, is Charles Grassley of Iowa, the Senate’s president pro tempore and its longest-serving Republican member. Senator Grassley is, in the most literal sense, the embodiment of the institution at its best, a man of deep Iowa roots who has never lost his farmer’s instinct for plain speech and hard accountability, who pursues government transparency and spending oversight with a persistence that outlasts any particular political moment, and whose recent legislative activity, ranging from prescription drug pricing to the Foster Youth Housing Opportunity Act, reflects an understanding that the purpose of a senator from Iowa is to serve the people of Iowa and, by extension, the ordinary people of the country who need someone in that chamber who has not forgotten where he came from.
Then you have Senator Ted Budd of North Carolina, who represents a newer cohort that has absorbed the populist energy of the current political moment and channeled it into legislative work on behalf of working families and small businesses, areas where federal policy has often been written by and for larger interests that could afford to participate in the regulatory process.
Conversely, there’s is also Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, a former governor who brings genuine executive experience to the chamber, has focused his legislative efforts on agricultural interests, small business formation, and the kind of economic self-determination that is, at its root, a constitutional argument about the limits of federal management of the private economy. His Stop Insider Trading Act, an effort to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks, is a particularly interesting piece of legislation precisely because it is an act of institutional self-restraint, a Congress choosing to limit its own advantages, which is the kind of accountability measure the founders would have recognized as genuinely republican in spirit.
Within the Cabinet, Vice President JD Vance has brought a particular intellectual framework that is worth examining on its merits. His background, detailed in a memoir that drew national attention for its portrait of the deindustrialized communities that felt left behind by the bipartisan consensus of the previous thirty years, informs a governing philosophy that is skeptical of elite credentialism, attentive to the economic and social conditions of working-class Americans, and deeply suspicious of the institutional drift that separated the governing class from the governed. His role in what the administration has called a war on fraud and waste within the federal government reflects a genuine conviction that the administrative state has grown in ways that serve the people who work in it more than the people who fund it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on the other hand represents a different but complementary dimension of the current alignment. His diplomatic work, including the intensive negotiations that produced the Gaza hostage agreement and his management of the administration’s relationships with NATO allies, reflects an understanding that American strength in the world is inseparable from American credibility at home. The founding father were never isolationists, they were realists who believed that American power should serve American interests, and that the primary interest was the security and prosperity of the people at home. As such, Secretary Rubio has articulated a version of that framework that is more sophisticated than the caricature of isolationism that critics sometimes substitute for actual engagement with the administration’s diplomatic philosophy.
We are now at the threshold of the most significant national anniversary in living American memory. On July 4, 2026, the United States will mark two hundred and fifty years since the signing of a document that changed the political history of the world. And the question that seems to me worth asking, as we approach that threshold, is not merely celebratory, but also analytical. Because the country that the founding fathers created was built on a premise that has been in tension with political reality for most of its history: that government exists to serve the people, that it derives its legitimacy from their consent, and that when it ceases to serve that purpose, it can and should be changed.
What the current political moment has done, imperfectly and contentiously and with a volume that sometimes obscures its substance, is to force that distance back into the center of political debate. The questions being asked, by voters in 2024 and by the officials those voters elected, are Jeffersonian questions like: Who does this government actually work for? Who makes the rules, and on whose behalf? What is the legitimate scope of federal authority, and what does it mean to say that the people are sovereign if they cannot meaningfully control the agencies that govern their daily lives?
These are not new questions, they are the original questions, and they are being asked again, loudly and with political consequence, at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the republic that was founded to answer them, seems to me neither accidental nor inconsequential. A country founded on the idea that government must answer to the people has, for this particular moment in its history, elected a governing coalition that takes that idea seriously as a matter of practical policy rather than rhetorical decoration. Whether it succeeds fully, whether its methods are always wise, whether the specific answers it finds are the right ones: these are all legitimate subjects of debate. But the animating question, the question the founders asked and fought a revolution to answer, is back at the center of American political life.
And that is what I would argue is the most appropriate way for anyone to enter the 251st year of American life.
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