In February 2017, Steve Bannon, then senior counselor and chief strategist to President Donald Trump, pledged to a gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC; initiates pronounce it “See-Pack”) that the Trump administration would bring about “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Bannon’s choice of the word “deconstruction” raises some possibility that he had in mind a textual interrogation in the style of Derrida. Laugh if you want, but Bannon claims an eclectic variety of intellectual influences, and the anti-regulatory movement that Bannon embraced did begin, in the 1940s, as a quixotic rejection of that same empiricism against which Derrida famously rebelled (“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte“). More likely, though, Bannon was using the word “deconstruction” as would a real estate tycoon such as his boss, to mean dismantlement and demolition. The “progressive left,” Bannon told See-Pack, when it can’t pass a law, “they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.” Kaboom! Already the wrecking ball was swinging. Reactionary federal judges had for decades been undermining federal agencies, egged on by conservative scholars such as Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School, the author in 2014 of the treatise, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Anti-regulation legal theorists are legatees of the “nine old men” of the Supreme Court who, through much of the 1930s, resisted President Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to bring regulation up to date with the previous half-century of industrialization. The high court made its peace with the New Deal in 1937 after Roosevelt threatened to expand its membership to fifteen. Today’s warriors against the administrative state see this as one of history’s tragic wrong turns. As president, Trump attacked the administrative state not to satisfy any ideology (Trump possesses none) but to pacify a business constituency alarmed by Trump’s protectionism, his Muslim-baiting, his white-nationalist-coddling, and all the rest. “Every business leader we’ve had in is saying not just taxes, but it is also the regulation,” Bannon told CPAC. But does the war against the administrative state hold appeal for ordinary Republican voters? The rank and file don’t especially hate government regulation of corporations except insofar as they hate government in general (especially when Democrats are in charge). They certainly don’t wish to succor the S&P 500, which, as Comrade Bannon made clear, is what the war on the administrative state is all about. Between August 2019 and October 2022, a Pew survey found, the proportion of Republicans and Republican leaners willing to say large corporations had a positive effect on America plummeted from fifty-four percent to twenty-six percent. Bannon’s vilification of the administrative state would therefore appear to run in a direction opposite that of Trump voters. The nomenklatura loved it at CPAC, but the words “administrative state” make normal people’s eyes glaze over. During his four years in office, Trump achieved only limited success dethroning the administrative state. On the one hand, he gummed up the works to prevent new regulations from coming out. The conservative American Action Forum calculated that during Trump’s presidency the administrative state imposed about one-tenth the regulatory costs imposed under President Obama. But on the other hand, Trump struggled to fulfill Bannon’s pledge to wipe out existing regulations. Trump’s political appointees were too ignorant about how the federal bureaucracy worked to wreak anywhere near the quantity of deconstruction that Trump sought. To eliminate a regulation requires that you follow, with some care, certain administrative procedures; otherwise a federal judge will rule against you. The bumbling camp followers that Trump put in charge of the Cabinet and the independent agencies lacked sufficient patience to get this right, and the civil servants working under them lacked sufficient motive to help them. According to New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, the Trump administration prevailed in legal challenges to its deregulatory actions only twenty-two percent of the time. Granted, in many instances where Trump lost, as the Brookings Institution’s Philip A. Wallach and Kelly Kennedy observed, he “still succeeded in weakening, if not erasing, Obama administration policy.” But after Biden came in, the new president set about reversing as many of Trump’s deregulatory actions as possible, lending a Sisyphean cast to the deconstruction of the administrative state. Just in Biden’s first year, the American Action Forum bemoaned that he imposed regulatory costs at twice the annual pace set by Obama. Clearly the only way Republicans can win this game is to gum up the regulatory works during both Republican and Democratic administrations. Distressingly, Trump will likely take a long stride toward achieving that goal in the current Supreme Court term. The vehicle of this particular act of deconstruction is a challenge to something called Chevron deference, by which the courts are obliged to grant leeway to the necessary and routine interpretation of statutes by regulatory agencies. The Supreme Court heard two Chevron cases in January and is expected to hand down an opinion in the spring. At oral argument, two of Trump’s three appointees to the high court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, were more than ready to overturn Chevron, along with Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Chief Justice John Roberts, though more circumspect, appeared likely to join them, furnishing the necessary fifth vote. In killing off Chevron deference, the right hopes not only to prevent new regulations from being issued, but also to prevent old ones from being enforced. This is the closest the business lobby has gotten in eighty-seven years to realizing its dream to repeal the New Deal. 
The administrative state is often described as a twentieth-century invention, but in 1996, in his book The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in 19th Century America, William J. Novak, a legal historian at the University of Michigan, showed that local governments were delegating police powers to local boards of health as far back as the 1790s, largely to impose quarantines during outbreaks of smallpox,
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