Where there is smoke, there is fire — and where there is a liberal group, there’s a chance at more government. I don’t often agree with liberals, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t principled in their thinking and logic. However, as a movement, the Left is easy to figure out: They support more government. They believe that they can make better decisions than business owners and that the government should use its baseball bat of power to beat the private sector into submission whenever possible.
Some of these tendencies left over from the Obama administration still exist today inside the Trump administration.
When a president takes office, there is usually a transition period. During the transition, some of the previous administration’s staff are still in place, and some of its projects are still being worked on. Under a normal transition, that usually ends quickly, but the Trump administration is a different animal. It has worked on issues with surgical precision and have left many other areas to just continue chugging along.
While that might not have been my strategy, admittedly, it has worked well for the administration. It has passed some bills, such as the tax reform law, that might not have made it through in another administration. It has changed regulations that have helped us start restoring our healthcare market and lowered regulations on businesses in ways that have helped grow businesses (at least pre-pandemic) everywhere.
However, this surgical approach also means that even today, more than three years into the Trump administration, there are still some Obama-era projects that still survive.
But, I think I have a solution, and the test case is an issue that I have already discussed, and others have pointed out as well.
The problem is the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs in the Department of Labor. It is charged with promoting affirmative action with federal contractors. That is good. But, under the Obama administration, it began aggressively harassing and suing companies for alleged discrimination. One of the big issues is that its enforcement actions are based solely on statistical evidence.
I am an economist, so I love statistics. However, economists also understand that statistics just help to tell the story. Statistics can, and should, be used to raise alarm bells, but that is where it should stop. After the alarm bells go off, the real work should start. What is wrong, what is being done to fix what is wrong, and are the statistics the right statistics. But the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs has taken more of a fire-first strategy going back to the Obama administration.
Now, a left-wing activist group, Democracy Forward, has engaged. It is working to support this government attack on the private sector: Oracle v Department of Labor.
So, maybe what the Trump administration should do is wait and see when a liberal group supports something that the administration is doing — and then cancel it. Whenever these groups are supporting instead of attacking a program, the odds of the program or lawsuit involving government overreach are astronomical.
It was obvious to observers of the Oracle lawsuit that it was government overreach from the beginning, and I understand that the president has been focused on areas outside of the Department of Labor. However, now that there is “smoke,” it should go in to put out the big-government fire.
Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor, and for an academic think tank.
