The Washington Post opinion page rarely fails to disappoint when it comes to delivering hyperbole. The reigning queen of that mode of editorial is Ruth Marcus, a writer of considerable talent who nonetheless cannot help but come up with lines like this: “No president in history has caused more damage to the nation more quickly. … (The country) faces a real threat that the harm he inflicts during his second term will be irreparable.” The specific cause of her consternation? President Donald Trump’s “unrelenting and broadscale assault on the federal workforce.”

She is hardly alone in her garment-rendering. A quick perusal of opinion headlines every morning reveals a barrage of dismay, offering only slight variations on the theme.

More than anything, this is illustrative of just how accustomed we have become to Leviathan. Bureaucracy has apparently become a pillar of American life, right up there with mom, apple pie and Normal Rockwell paintings, each of which fall under the regulatory jurisdiction of one federal agency or another.

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The latest panic attack involves the fate of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has come under the menacing glare of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Indeed, Musk and Trump both proved — again — that hyperbole is not a skill exclusive to the left when both posted on X (sidenote: for how long do we need to keep qualifying that with the standard “formerly known as Twitter” follow-up?) things like USAID being a “vipers nest” (Musk) and that “they turned out to be radical left lunatics” (Trump).

USAID, to be fair, does have (or at least used to have) a legitimate job, as a tool of American foreign policy and soft power. Its aim and purpose was to help desperately poor nations find their way to adopting capitalist, free-market economies and stable political systems based on individual rights and rule of law, as an ounce of prevention against communist takeover. But, like every government program, mission creep settled in, eventually displaced by full-scale mission overhaul, to the point a great many of its programs were no longer particularly useful to advancing American interests, or really even humanitarian assistance, but instead ranging from the pointless (such as $1.5 million to “advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”) to the questionable (e.g. $53 million “to enable and empower local governments and vulnerable communities to realize their own resilient, low-carbon futures” to some arguably antithetical to American national interest (such as $122 million going to groups aligned with foreign terrorist organizations.) So, yes, some reform is in order.

But one thing DOGE cannot do is to fully disestablish the agency; it was established by Congress as an independent agency under the aegis of the State Department in 1998, meaning it would take an act of Congress to eliminate it. What the executive branch can do is place it fully under the auspices and management of the State Department, which is appropriate in any case — the deployment of U.S. soft power is too potent a tool in our foreign policy kit to risk to ideological excess in either direction, whether reducing it from the left to a mere global Petri dish of trendy ideological fashions (as done at least the last four years), or to eliminate the capability altogether and leave underdeveloped peoples around the globe fleeing into the arms of out adversaries (as some on the populist right threaten).

Even riskier is President Trump’s reckless embrace of protectionism as a flippant negotiating tool. The abandonment of the principles espoused by David Ricardo (not to mention Milton Friedman) by the new crop of Republicans may be the single greatest economic tragedy to befall us this century. Subsidizing the depreciation of the dollar under a shroud of tariffs will not end any better than former President Joe Biden’s subsidization of inflation through excessive government spending. “But wait!” cry the Brethren of the Red Hat, “they worked!”

Well, sort of. Mexico promised to send 10,000 troops to the U.S. border to help stem the drug trade; but they have done that before, and no one knows what exactly they will be doing, if anything. The hapless clown frailly clinging to the Prime Minstership in Canada, Justin Trudeau, offered to do much the same… back in December. Yes, the incompetent fool named a “fentanyl czar” upon Trump’s tariff threats, but what exactly will that accomplish? Far more fentanyl is coming in from the southern border, and in any case, aren’t there bigger issues with Canada? Like getting them within telescope distance of the 2% of GDP defense spending they are required to come up with under their NATO commitment?

And even if they did “work” in the short term, that is not the full measure of good economic policy. High progressive tax rates “work” to increase revenue — until they bring growth to a standstill and cost more than they generate. Price controls and easy money policies “worked” in the 1970s — until they caused “stagflation”. Keynesian economic management policies and Smoot-Hawley-inspired tariffs “worked” in the late 1920’s — until they caused the Great Depression.

Russel Kirk wrote, “a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.” Prudence, and an affection for gradual change is the cornerstone of conservatism. The ultimate aims Trump seeks — the taming of Leviathan, arresting the exponential growth of crippling bureaucracy, and stemming illegal immigration and the flow of fentanyl across the borders — are too important to be risked by pursuing them imprudently.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.