Random Excerpts

A casual reader might take the last few pages as surveying a broad array of challenges facing the American people and the next conservative President: supranational policymaking, border security, globalization, engagement with China, manufacturing, Big Tech, and Beijing-compromised colleges.

• Congress should expand eligibility to all students, regardless of income or background, and raise the scholarship amount closer to the funding students receive in D.C. Public Schools (spending per student in 2020 was $22,856).

The Administration has incorporated its radical climate policy into every USAID initiative. It has joined or funded international partnerships dedicated to advancing the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement and has supported the idea of giving trillions of dollars more in aid transfers for “climate reparations.”

7. Reverse policies that allow transgender individuals to serve in the military. Gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service, and the use of public monies for transgender surgeries or to facilitate abortion for servicemembers should be ended.

Recently, however, many in the conservative movement have taken a broader view of antitrust. They point out that the authors of our antitrust laws did not intend this purely economic understanding of competitive markets—and the normative assumptions that undergird it—to guide their legislation. First, these principles were only imperfectly worked out at the time the antitrust laws were passed. Second, contemporaneous statements concerning the Sherman and Clayton Acts demonstrate Congress’s concern about the political and economic power of the oil and railroad trusts of the first Gilded Age, and their influence on democratic institutions and civil society. Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’ baleful effects on democratic institutions such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive behavior with government.

Departmental Offices. Departmental offices are composed of divisions headed by under-secretaries and assistant secretaries who are primarily responsible for policy formulation and overall management of the Treasury Department.

International Religious Freedom. Conservatives believe international religious freedom is central to USAID’s development efforts. President Trump’s Executive Order 13926 on “Advancing International Religious Freedom” instructed the Secretary of State, in consultation with the USAID Administrator, to budget at least $50 million a year for programs that advance international religious freedom and “ensure that faith-based and religious entities, including eligible entities in foreign countries, are not discriminated against on the basis of religious identity or religious belief when competing for Federal funding.”

In other words, all Republican Presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake. As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia warned that conservatives were being “confronted with along-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.”*”

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The State Department’s greatest problem is certainly not an absence of resources. As noted, the department boasts tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars of funding—including significant amounts of discretionary funding. It also exists among a broader array of federal agencies that are duplicative, particularly when it comes to the provision of direct and indirect foreign assistance. Realistically, meaningful reform of the State Department will require significant streamlining.