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by the bureaucracy or by the President—writes federal policy, enforces that policy, and often adjudicates whether that policy was properly drafted and enforced. The overall situation is constitutionally dire, unsustainably expensive, and in urgent need of repair. Nothing less than the survival of self-governance in America is at stake.

The great challenge confronting a conservative President is the existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch to return power— including power currently held by the executive branch—to the American people. Success in meeting that challenge will require a rare combination of boldness and self-denial: boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will and self-denial to use the bureaucratic machine to send power away from Washington and back to America’s families, faith communities, local governments, and states.

Fortunately, a President who is willing to lead will find in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) the levers necessary to reverse this trend and impose a sound direction for the nation on the federal bureaucracy. The effectiveness of those EOP levers depends on the fundamental premise that it is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority and that, as a general matter, it is the President’s chosen advisers who have the best sense of the President’s aims and intentions, both with respect to the policies he intends to enact and with respect to the interests that must be secured to govern successfully on behalf of the American people. This chapter focuses on key features of and recommendations for several of the EOP’s important components.

U.S. OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET (OMB)

OMB assists the President in the execution of his policy agenda across the government by employing many statutory and executive procedural levers to bring the bureaucracy in line with all budgetary, regulatory, and management decisions. Properly understood, it is a President’s air-traffic control system with the ability and charge to ensure that all policy initiatives are flying in sync and with the authority to let planes take off and, at times, ground planes that are flying off course. OMB’s key roles include:

• Developing and enforcing the President’s budget and executing the appropriations laws that fund the government;

• Managing agency and personnel performance, procurement policy, financial management, and information technology;

• Developing the President’s regulatory agenda, reviewing new regulatory

actions, reviewing federal information collections, and setting and enforcing federal information policy; and