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longstanding reputation has been marred by the Biden Administration’s abuse of the department’s powers for its own ends. Hamilton writes that the department’s

“unprecedented politicization and weaponization” under Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, resulting in “politically motivated and viewpoint-based prosecutions” of political enemies and indifference to the crimes of political allies, has made the department “a threat to the Republic.” The most important thing for the next attorney general to do is to refocus the department on its core functions of

“protecting public safety and defending the rule of law,” while restoring its “values of independence, impartiality, honesty, integrity, respect, and excellence.”

This is especially true of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). A bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization, especially at the top, “the FBI views itself as an independent agency” that is “on par with the Attorney General,” rather than as an agency that is under the AG and fully accountable to him or her. To rein in this “completely out of control” bureau and remind it of its place within—rather than at the top of—the DOJ hierarchy, Hamilton writes that the FBI’s separate Office of General Counsel (with “approximately 300 attorneys”), separate Office of Legislative Affairs, and separate Office of Public Affairs should all be abolished. Requiring the FBI to get its legal advice from the wider department “would serve as acrucial check on an agency that has recently pushed past legal boundary after legal boundary.” Indeed, Hamilton writes, “[t]he next conservative Administration should eliminate any offices within the FBI that it has the power to eliminate without any action from Congress.”

Elsewhere, DOJ should target violent and career criminals, not parents; work to dismantle criminal organizations, partly by rigorously prosecuting interstate drug activity; and restart the Trump Administration’s “China Initiative” (to address Chinese espionage and theft of trade secrets), which the Biden Administration “terminated...largely out of a concern for poor “optics.” It should also enforce existing federal law that prohibits mailing abortifacients, rather than harassing pro-life demonstrators; respect the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of speech, rather than trying to police speech on the internet; and enforce federal immigration laws, rather than pretending there is no border.

In contrast to DOJ’s long history, the Department of Education (the department, or ED), discussed by Lindsey Burke in Chapter 11, is a creation of the Jimmy Carter Administration. The department is a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel, which—as the COVID era showed—is not particularly concerned with children’s education. Schools should be responsive to parents, rather than to leftist advocates intent on indoctrination—and the more the federal government is involved in education, the less responsive to parents the public schools will be. This department is an example of federal intrusion into a traditionally state and local realm. For the sake of American children, Congress should shutter it and return control of education to the states.