It's just telling that you've got an authoritarian playbook that sort of, at every pass, seems to be more focused on driving up corporate profits at the expense of the American people.
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Onward!
Today, President Joe Biden has brought us back to the days of Jimmy Carter— actually, even worse—with full-bore economic, military, cultural, and foreign policy turmoil. The advice that I wrote more than four decades ago just as easily could have been written today. A conservative Administration coming on board in 2025 will need to hit the ground running just to undo the significant damage that will have been done during the Biden years.
Something that is essential to ensuring that a new President in 2025 can successfully implement a conservative agenda is having the right personnel to run the executive branch departments and their agencies.
This is why it is so often said that “people are policy.” The Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, assistant secretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, administrators, agency heads, and on and on that a new President chooses to place throughout the executive branch must be principled individuals already aligned with the President’s conservative vision. And they must be willing to execute it on the President’s behalf.
These personnel choices will ultimately determine the success or failure of the policy agenda and, hence, of the whole Administration.
Presidential appointees not only are critical to implementing the policy agenda, but also must serve to “watch the watchers” in the departments and agencies they oversee. They must ensure accountability as well as provide a check on the inherent nature of the administrative state to overreach its authority.
For example, they must rein in the Environmental Protection Agency, which declared backyard streams navigable waterways that then fall under its authority. They must rein in the Internal Revenue Service, including its 87,000 new employees hired to pick through every detail of what Americans make and how they spend their money. They must rein in agencies such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which the Biden Administration weaponized to attempt to force COVID-19 vaccine mandates on 84 million Americans through their workplaces.
When these new presidential appointees come into office, it is often the career bureaucrats who end up orienting them to their new positions. Many of these bureaucrats are all too comfortable with the status quo. Appointees have only four years (eight at the most) to effect change and make a difference. They need a road map to do that starting on Day One.
That road map is exactly what Mandate provides. It is not a mandate to maintain the status quo but just do it a little more efficiently. Rather, it is a mandate to significantly advance conservative principles in practice and demonstrate to the American people that where liberal policies generally fail, conservative solutions succeed in making life better for all of us.
From the original 1981 Reagan-era Mandate for Leadership to this edition for 2025, the purpose remains the same: to present concrete proposals to revitalize