Random Excerpts

of state or local employees are exempt from this filing requirement. These disclosure requirements help workers and the public understand how union leaders are raising and spending union dues; they also can serve as a vital source of information that helps workers decide if the unions they are asked to join are good stewards of the funds they collect. DOL, under both George W. Bush and Donald Trump, tried rulemakings (known as the Intermediate Bodies Rule) that would require some government unions to file the same information that is required of private-sector unions.

Consolidate foreign assistance authorities. Foreign assistance is a critical foreign policy tool that is too often disconnected from the federal government's practice of foreign policy. Bureaucrats spend significant energy resisting the use of non-emergency foreign assistance to leverage positive results for the United States, even though it is a perfectly reasonable proposition. The coordination of foreign assistance dollars is also difficult because the foreign assistance budget and foreign loan issuance authorities are divided across numerous Cabinet departments, smaller agencies, and other offices.

Others think that the post-New Deal expansion of the administrative state has had baleful effects upon our society and earnestly share the hope that it can be greatly curtailed if not eliminated—or that its authority can be returned to the states and other democratically accountable political institutions. But, until there is areturn to a constitutional structure that the Founding Fathers would have recognized and a massive shrinking of the administrative state, conservatives cannot unilaterally disarm and fail to use the power of government to further a conservative agenda. As experience shows, the administrative state will grow and further its own agenda, often at odds with conservative thought, even under conservative leadership. Unless conservatives take a firm hand to the bureaucracy and marshal its power to defend a freedom-promoting agenda, nothing will stop the bureaucracy’s anti-free market, leftist march.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is a DHS component that the Left has weaponized to censor speech and affect elections at the expense of securing the cyber domain and critical infrastructure, which are threatened daily.” A conservative Administration should return CISA to its statutory and important but narrow mission.

President’s Intelligence Advisory Board and PIAB Intelligence Oversight Board. The President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) is charged with providing the President with an independent source of advice on the IC’s effectiveness while offering insights into the IC’s future plans. The Board is meant to have access to all information needed to perform its functions and to have direct access to the President. The Intelligence Oversight Board is a standing committee within the PIAB. These entities should be tasked with giving independent, informed advice and opinion concerning major matters of national security focused on long-term, enduring issues central to advancing and protecting American interests. This should include taking a broader, deeper look at critical trends, developments, and their implications for U.S. national and economic security relying on unclassified and open-source information.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost certainly spawned in a CCP biological weapons lab in Wuhan, China,” global supply chains have been under significant pressures from lockdown policies, energy price shocks, and other disruptions, including labor market disruptions. At the height of the pandemic, the rising geopolitical risk associated with globalized supply chains was underscored when Communist China, which controls much of the world’s pharmaceutical production and supply chains, threatened to plunge America “into a mighty sea of coronavirus” through pharmaceutical export controls° if American politicians dared to investigate what happened at the Wuhan lab.

• Provide clear regulations for ESOP valuation and fiduciary conduct. DOL should make it easier for employers to offer ESOPs by providing clear regulations for ESOP valuation and fiduciary conduct that encourages the participation of employee beneficiaries in corporate governance, while recognizing the importance of financial diversification for retirement security.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The preparation of this chapter was a collective enterprise of individuals involved in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume, but Jonathan Butcher, Bob Eitel, Jim Blew, Diane Auer Jones, Erin Valdez, Andrew Gillen, and Max Eden deserve special mention. The author alone assumes responsibility for the content of this chapter, and no views expressed herein should be attributed to any other individual.

To increase transparency, HHS should clarify how states, in their quarterly and annual reports, ought to track and audit the outcomes from how they spend TANF funds to meet the TANF program’s four statutory purposes.

Every one of the overreaching policies during the pandemic—from lockdowns and school closures to mask and vaccine mandates or passports—received its supposed legal justification from the state of emergency declared (and renewed) by the HHS Secretary. Tellingly, however, the threshold for what constitutes a public health emergency—how many cases, hospitalizations, deaths, etc.—was never defined. For the sake of democratic accountability, we must know with clarity what will trigger the next emergency declaration and, just as important, what will trigger its end.