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Grievance Audit34

Grievance Audit No. 2: 'Swarms of Officers.' They Warned Us. Then We Built a Government That Can't Count Its Own Agencies.

FREEDOM BEAGLE STAFF · JULY 18, 2026

The Grievance Audit holds the modern federal record up against the twenty-seven grievances the Declaration of Independence leveled at King George III in 1776. Same method every time: quote the grievance, quote what the Founders built to fix it, lay out today’s record with citations. Terms of art are defined per Black’s Law Dictionary. Reporting on documents, not legal advice.

The grievance

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” — Declaration of Independence, para. 12 (1776)

Note what actually offended them. Not one tyrant — a multitude. Not soldiers — officers. The complaint is structural: a government that grows new offices faster than anyone can track, staffed by functionaries whose salaries and enforcement powers come out of the governed. “Eat out their substance” is eighteenth-century for funded by you, aimed at you.

What the Founders built

The fix was to lock lawmaking power in one accountable, elected place:

  • U.S. Const. art. I, § 1: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” All of them. In Congress. Full stop.
  • U.S. Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 1: the executive power — the power to carry out laws, not write them — vests in the President.

The design is a wall: the branch that writes the rules (Congress) must answer to voters every two to six years. The branch that enforces them cannot invent them. An unelected office was never supposed to be able to make a rule that lands on you with the force of law.

The terms, per Black’s

  • Administrative agency — Black’s Law Dictionary (12th ed. 2024): a governmental body, other than a court or legislature, having authority to implement and administer particular legislation.
  • Nondelegation doctrine — per Black’s, the principle that Congress cannot delegate its legislative power to administrative agencies.
  • Rulemaking — per Black’s, the process by which an administrative agency formulates, amends, or repeals a rule or regulation carrying the force of law.
  • Deference — per Black’s, a court’s willingness to yield to another entity’s judgment; here, a court accepting an agency’s own reading of the statute the agency enforces.

The record today

Start with the number nobody can produce: how many federal agencies exist. This is not a rhetorical flourish. The Administrative Conference of the United States — a federal agency whose literal job is to study the administrative state — states in its Sourcebook of United States Executive Agencies (2d ed. 2018) that “there is no authoritative list of government agencies,” and lists 115 in its own appendix. FOIA.gov, which tracks bodies that must answer records requests, counts 78 independent agencies plus 174 components of executive departments. The Federal Register’s index runs to more than 430 departments, agencies, and sub-agencies. The government’s own sources span from roughly 115 to 430-plus, because, as the Sourcebook explains, Congress defines “agency” differently in different statutes and never wrote one governing definition. A “multitude of New Offices” so vast the government cannot count them is not a metaphor the Founders reached for. It’s Tuesday.

The paper trail is measured in six figures a year. The Federal Register — the government’s daily gazette of proposed and final rules — ran to 106,109 pages in 2024, the highest annual total in its history, eclipsing the prior record of 95,894, according to Office of the Federal Register data tallied in the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s review and the Congressional Research Service’s rulemaking reports. Those pages carried 3,248 final rules in 2024 alone, up 8% from 3,018 the year before. And that’s just the year’s new output. The standing body of regulation — the Code of Federal Regulations — now fills 50 titles across roughly 200 volumes (National Archives / Government Publishing Office). The Founders wrote a Constitution you can carry in a shirt pocket. The rules made under it no longer fit on a bookshelf.

Here is the ratio that names the grievance. In a representative recent year (2020), federal agencies issued 3,353 rules while Congress passed 178 laws — roughly 19 agency rules for every act of the elected legislature, per counts compiled by the Congressional Research Service (Report R43056) and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which labels the gap the “Unconstitutionality Index.” Across the last decade the average runs near 22 rules per law. Read the vesting clause again — “all legislative Powers… vested in a Congress” — then sit with a system in which the elected lawmakers produce well under 5% of the binding federal commands issued each year.

These offices are staffed by millions. The federal government employed roughly 2.9 million civilians in 2025 — about 2.14 million excluding the Postal Service — according to workforce data compiled by the Office of Personnel Management and analyzed by Pew Research Center and USAFacts. That figure fell sharply during 2025 amid a downsizing push, itself a live news story; the point for the audit is the standing scale of the establishment, not any single year’s churn.

And the commands they write number in the millions. Beyond the annual page counts, the Mercatus Center’s RegData/QuantGov project counts the actual binding restrictions embedded in the CFR — every instance of “shall,” “must,” “may not,” “prohibited,” “required” — and has tallied over one million of them. Each is a place the government can tell you what to do or fine you for not doing it, and the overwhelming majority were written by officers whose names you don’t know and cannot vote out.

For forty years, the government even got to interpret the limits of its own power. Under Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), when a statute was ambiguous, courts were required to defer to the enforcing agency’s own interpretation of what the statute let it do. The referee deferred to the player on the question of what the rules meant. That regime ended on June 28, 2024, when the Supreme Court overruled Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024), holding that the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 706, “requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.” Forty years of the officers grading their own homework — ended by a single 2024 opinion.

By the numbers

  • 115 to 430+ — range of the federal government’s own counts of how many agencies it has (ACUS Sourcebook 2d ed.; FOIA.gov; Federal Register)
  • 106,109 — pages in the 2024 Federal Register, an all-time record (Office of the Federal Register)
  • 3,248 — final rules issued by agencies in 2024 (CRS / CEI)
  • ~19 to 1 — recent ratio of agency rules to laws passed by Congress (CRS R43056; CEI “Unconstitutionality Index”)
  • 50 titles / ~200 volumes — size of the standing Code of Federal Regulations (National Archives / GPO)
  • 1,000,000+ — binding restrictions in the CFR (Mercatus RegData)
  • ~2.9 million — federal civilian employees, 2025 (OPM; Pew; USAFacts)
  • 40 years — length of the Chevron era in which courts deferred to agencies’ reading of their own authority, 1984–2024 (Loper Bright)

The counterweight

Here is the other side, stated as precisely as the charge. This administrative apparatus was not imposed by a foreign king — it was built by Congress, through statutes like the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, 5 U.S.C. § 551 et seq., and every agency’s individual enabling act. It is delegation the people’s own representatives voted for. The agencies do work almost no one wants Congress micromanaging by hand: air traffic control, drug safety, food inspection, disease surveillance. Defenders argue a 535-member legislature cannot write the technical specifics for a continental economy, and that expert agencies are the practical answer. The regulatory cost estimates that circulate — the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual Ten Thousand Commandments report puts the figure near two trillion dollars a year — come from advocacy shops with a point of view, are hotly contested on methodology, and by design leave out regulatory benefits like avoided deaths and cleaner air. And the courts are visibly reasserting the wall: Loper Bright in 2024, plus the “major questions doctrine” of West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697 (2022), which requires clear congressional authorization before an agency decides a question of vast economic and political significance. The system, its defenders note, is correcting itself in real time.

All true. And all of it concedes the audit’s core fact: the wall the Founders built — lawmaking in one elected place — has been porous for the better part of a century, and it took the Supreme Court until 2024 to start re-pointing the mortar.

The audit

The 1776 grievance was a government that grew offices beyond counting and loosed officers, funded by the governed, to rule the governed. The 2026 record is a federal establishment that cannot state how many agencies it contains, staffs them with millions, produces over a million binding restrictions no voter ratified, and spent forty years with those same agencies empowered to interpret the reach of their own authority. The Founders drew a hard line: all legislative power, one elected Congress. The line held on paper. In practice it was delegated, sub-delegated, and deferred to — until a 2024 Court began pulling it back.

Delegata potestas non potest delegari — a delegated power cannot itself be delegated.

Next in the series: “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”

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