Administrative State

The body of unelected federal regulatory agencies, civil-service bureaucracies, and rule-making bodies that the New Right treats as the locus of post-1930s liberal governance; what Schedule F, Project 2025, and Claremont legal theory are designed to dismantle

The phrase functions as the New Right’s all-purpose name for the post–New Deal regulatory and bureaucratic state — the EPA, SEC, IRS, ATF, Department of Education, federal civil service — which conservatives view as effectively a “fourth branch” exercising legislative, executive, and judicial power without democratic accountability. Hostility to the administrative state unifies otherwise divergent New Right factions:

• Claremont legal theorists (John Marini, Charles Kesler) frame it as a Wilsonian-progressive subversion of the Constitution’s separation of powers
• Common Good Constitutionalists (Adrian Vermeule) accept the administrative state as a vehicle but want it captured for substantive moral ends — see Integration from Within
• Project 2025 (Heritage Foundation) treats dismantling/repurposing it as the primary task of a second Trump term, via Schedule F and aggressive political appointees

See also: Schedule F, Counterrevolution, Project 2025, Common Good Constitutionalism.