administrative state of the United States
What is the administrative state of the U. S.?
When did the U.S. administrative state begin to take shape?
What role did the Progressive Era play in the development of the administrative state?
How have modern Republican administrations viewed the administrative state?
What changes did Donald Trump implement regarding federal agencies during his second term?
administrative state of the United States, the portion of the executive branch of the U.S. government consisting of agencies that implement legislation through rules and programs that are usually too technical, precise, or particular to be included in the legislation itself. Administrative agencies operate with varying degrees of independence, and many also have the power to enforce the rules that they create. The administrative state of the United States began to take shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since that time it has remained an important element of both federal and state governments.
The development of administrative agencies
Until the late 19th century major commercial disputes in the United States were usually resolved through private litigation. As the economists Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer wrote in a 2003 paper, “The Rise of the Regulatory State”:
Courts ruled on corporate liability in industrial accidents, on anti-competitive practices such as railroad rebates, on safety of foods and medicines, and even on the constitutionality of income tax.
The number and size of individual businesses grew significantly in the 19th century, thanks in part to industrialization. With that development, however, “the damage from industrial accidents rose proportionately, as did the incentives to avoid paying damages.” The court system did not evolve as quickly, and it was relatively easy for the business leaders of the age, who are derisively remembered as “robber barons,” to influence the justice system and thereby skirt liability.
In a 1913 essay titled “The New Freedom,” Pres. Woodrow Wilson remarked that “the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak.” He argued that a need had arisen for regulations that no one would have conceived of in the 18th century:
If somebody puts a derrick improperly secured on top of a building or overtopping the street, then the government of the city has the right to see that that derrick is so secured that you and I can walk under it and not be afraid that the heavens are going to fall on us.
Similarly, in reference to industrial workers, Wilson insisted that “it is the privilege of the government…to see that human life is protected, that human lungs have something to breathe.”
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The Progressive Era saw the establishment of many regulatory agencies in the United States, including the Department of Commerce and Labor, later divided into the Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor; the Office of Road Inquiry, a precursor of the Federal Highway Administration; and the Division of Chemistry, the first regulatory antecedent of the Food and Drug Administration. A superintendent of immigration was first appointed in 1891, and the Federal Reserve System was created in 1913.
Another set of agencies was established in the 1930s as part of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, including the Social Security Administration (originally the Social Security Board), the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Federal Housing Administration.
A great number of other administrative agencies have since been created, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 1973, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2010. Several very important programs operating under existing agencies also have been enacted, such as Head Start (designed to help prepare children from disadvantaged families for success in public schools) in 1965 and Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. All told, there are now hundreds of federal agencies performing administrative functions in the United States.
Republican opposition to the administrative state
Since the Progressive Era—a period when expertise and efficiency in government became paramount values—most administrative agencies have been regarded as the nonpartisan domain of experts, a status that justifies their operational independence. However, from the start of the New Deal, this view was increasingly challenged by conservatives, who viewed independent agencies as constituting an undemocratic form of government. From the first administration of Pres. Donald Trump (2017–21) conservatives commonly referred to the body of independent agencies as the “deep state.”
During the 1980s, Republican Pres. Ronald Reagan took great strides to weaken and scale back regulatory agencies while also handing over the leadership of some agencies to figures who were hostile to their basic missions. For example, Anne Gorsuch, a conservative attorney who advocated greater state-level control over the enforcement of environmental regulations, became head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Subsequent Republican presidents have followed Reagan’s example. Midway through the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden (2021–25), conservative think tanks, most notably the Heritage Foundation, began drawing up plans to overhaul the administrative state should former president Trump win a second term in 2024 (see Project 2025). The people working on these projects hoped to convert many of the jobs in administrative agencies to political positions, which would enable the new president to fire civil servants without cause—that is, for reasons unrelated to their actual performance—and without notice or the right to appeal. By such means the affected agencies would cease to be independent of the president’s authority.
The number of genuinely independent federal agencies decreased significantly from the start of Trump’s second administration (2025– ) in the wake of his executive order reinstating Schedule F—a new employment category, created by Trump in 2020, designed to remove standard job protections for administrative officials by reclassifying them as political appointees. (The order by which Trump had established Schedule F was rescinded by Biden in 2021.) Under the renamed category “Schedule Policy/Career,” the Trump administration was able to reduce or eliminate the programs of several administrative agencies and to effectively dismantle the agencies themselves by firing tens of thousands of career civil servants.