America’s Hidden Monarchy: The Administrative State Rules Without Consent

We tell ourselves that America abolished monarchy in 1776. We didn't. We cut off the head of hereditary monarchy, but we quietly rebuilt the body. The most serious monarchy in America today is not a king in London. It is the unaccountable administrative state in Washington.

That is the angle most people miss. Monarchy is not a costume. It is not crowns, carriages, or palace guards. Monarchy is a structure of unaccountable power. And we have reproduced that structure with remarkable precision-minus the succession, but with all the arbitrary authority.

The Founders did not object to George III merely because he inherited a title. They objected because he claimed the right to rule without their consent. Read the Declaration's grievances beyond the famous opening lines. Among them is this: "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance." That is not a complaint about expensive robes. It is a complaint about unaccountable bureaucracy. The king's real crime was that he ruled them without their votes, their representation, or their consent.

Now look at Washington.

A King by Another Name

The Federal Register, where new rules are published, adds tens of thousands of pages every year. The Code of Federal Regulations contains hundreds of thousands of pages of rules that carry the force of law. Federal agencies write those rules. They enforce those rules. They often adjudicate disputes under those rules. They issue "guidance," but woe to the ordinary person who ignores that guidance. In one body, they combine the power to legislate, prosecute, judge, and execute.

That is not a bug of the modern state. That is the definition of tyranny.

James Madison saw it coming. In Federalist 47 he wrote: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." The modern regulatory agency is exactly that: a miniature crown. It legislates by rule, enforces with its own compliance officers, and adjudicates before its own administrative law judges. The agency writes the law, enforces the law, and then sits in judgment over the dispute. We did not eliminate monarchy. We distributed it among thousands of tenured officials.

The new monarch is not chosen by heredity. He is chosen by credential. The crown has been replaced by the résumé. Question the rule and you are told, "Trust the experts."

But expertise is a tool, not a title to rule. A physicist is not a king. An economist is not a legislature. A public-health official is not a court. The Founders understood that consent of the governed means the people choose their lawmakers-and those lawmakers do not outsource the job to unaccountable administrators.

Rule by Decree and the New Courtiers

The administrative monarchy follows the worst features of the old one.

First, rule by decree. Agencies do not wait for Congress. They issue memoranda, interim final rules, regulatory "alerts," and then treat those documents as binding law. A family business can find that what was perfectly legal last year is a federal violation this year, not because Congress passed a law, but because a distant agency reinterpreted a word. That is the essence of arbitrary power.

Second, the king can do no wrong. Sovereign immunity and decades of judicial deference toward agencies revived that old fiction. If a federal agency unlawfully ruins your business, your farm, or your retirement, you may spend years discovering how hard it is to hold the sovereign accountable. For generations, courts told the citizen that when a statute is ambiguous, the agency's interpretation should win. That doctrine was finally repudiated in a landmark 2024 ruling, but the habit of bowing to agency power is older than any single case and survives in many forms.

Third, courtiers. Lobbyists, grant-funded nonprofits, consultants, and allied corporations thrive by proximity to royal power. They do not make the laws. They shape them. They attend the meetings, draft the comments, and walk through the revolving door between agency and industry. This is court politics with better lighting.

Some will object: "We need this. The modern economy is complex; Congress cannot know everything."

The Complexity Objection Fails

That gets it exactly backwards. Complexity is an argument against central planning, not for it. Friedrich Hayek's great insight is that the knowledge required to run an economy-or a society-is dispersed across millions of individuals. No central planner, no matter how credentialed, can gather that knowledge. A regulator in Washington cannot know your local business, your land, your family's needs, or the thousand small adjustments that make a community work. Centralized monarchy does not solve complexity. It imposes uniform ignorance across an enormous, diverse country. The freedom to experiment, compete, and adapt is the real answer to complexity.

Another objection: "Bureaucrats are not kings because they are appointed and can be fired."

In theory. In practice, civil-service protections, union rules, and the sheer size of the federal workforce make removal rare. A president is not even fully in control of the executive branch he supposedly leads. A king might fire a minister in a rage. An American president often cannot fire a mid-level bureaucrat who wields more practical power than a minister. That is not accountability. It is the worst kind of monarchy-one without a face.

Dismantling the Monarchy

The answer is not to elect better kings. The answer is to have no kings.

We must return to the constitutional design. Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution vests all legislative powers in Congress-not in commissions, boards, or agencies. Congress writes the laws. The executive executes them. The courts interpret them. States and the people keep everything else.

That means Congress should stop handing its legislative power to agencies. If a regulation is important enough to bind a free people, it should be important enough for Congress to vote on it. If the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate a farmer's puddle as a navigable water, the people's elected representatives should have to say so explicitly and take the heat for it. If a federal agency wants to redefine a firearm, a food, or a labor practice, that decision should come from the legislature-not from a guidance document written by unelected staff.

It means courts should stop deferring to agency interpretations and return to their constitutional role: saying what the law is, not what the agency wishes it were. It means breaking up the administrative courts housed inside agencies, where the judge is the agency's own employee. It means restoring federalism so that decisions are made close to the people who must live under them.

This is the anti-monarchy program.

We cannot honestly call ourselves a republic while the ordinary citizen faces a sovereign he never elected, cannot fire, and cannot easily sue. The American Revolution was not about replacing a king with a committee. It was about replacing rule by the unaccountable with rule by law and consent.

When asked what the Constitutional Convention had produced, Benjamin Franklin reportedly answered, "A republic, if you can keep it." We have not kept it if we allow the administrative state to rule by decree. A crown by any other name-agency, commission, board, or "expert"-is still a crown.

Our job is not to find a better monarch. Our job is to remember that in a republic, the people are sovereign, and every official-no matter how credentialed-is a servant.