Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) warned Monday that congressional authority is seriously at risk, with the administrative state taking increased power as it grows.

“It’s this system that sustains the delicate balance between and among each branch of government,” Grassley said in a lecture at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in the nation’s capital. “Regretfully, today, this balance has shifted. Today we live under a government that the framers would not recognize.

“We have become a nation that is no longer governed by congressional actions, enforced by the president and interpreted by the courts. Today, we are ruled more and more by excess regulation and executive fiat.

“Worst, we have done little to prevent our system of separated powers from yielding itself to the sweeping authority of federal agencies and what many call, and rightfully so, the administrative state.”

By “administrative state,” Grassley means the federal bureaucracy, with 2.1 million employees, which issues thousands of new rules and regulations every year that govern the daily lives of all American citizens to an increasingly pervasive degree. President Donald Trump has repealed more such regulations than any previous chief executive.

He believes that the constitutional balance of powers among the three branches of government is at risk, as bureaucrats accumulate more power and become progressively less subject to oversight by Congress and the federal courts.

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Grassley said the administrative state’s growth is the responsibility of both Democrats and Republicans, who have for decades conceded authorities to the bureaucracy that, traditionally, Congress had jealously guarded.

“The modern administrative state is a good deal for Congress, which can pass bills with lofty goals and take credit, while agencies sort out the details that Congress doesn’t want to deal with,” he said.

“It’s also a good deal for special interests and well-connected corporations, who can afford to sort through scores of regulations published each year, an advantage small businesses don’t have. But it’s a rotten deal for the American people,” Grassley said.

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President Donald Trump has called out the administrative state and entrenched special interests since the campaign.  Grassley applauded the president for reducing the regulatory burden but warned that lasting reform requires fundamental structural changes and lawmakers actively exercising more control and oversight of the bureaucracy. Protecting whistleblowers in the bureaucracy is also vital, he said.

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“The more we tip the constitutional scale, the less accountable government will be to the people who are sovereign,” Grassley said. “There are often many layers of people between the elected executives and the nonelected bureaucrats making the critical decisions. This means there is a lot of distance between the everyday decision-makers and the ultimate source of authority, again the American people.”

The federal government has grown rapidly over the decades, as shown by total annual spending. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, found that the federal government spent $3.9 trillion in 2016, which accounts for 21 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Connor Wolf covers Congress and national politics and can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.

(photo credit, homepage and article images: Chuck Grassley [1], [2], CC BY-SA 2.0, by Gage Skidmore)