On July 1, 1776, the men who would become the founding fathers didn’t know they’d win. They knew only this: the institutional order they were living under had stopped serving the people it was supposed to protect, and it had to go. They didn’t preserve an existing system. They dismantled one. That’s not a comfortable parallel for either side of today’s argument, but it should be.
Tomorrow is the 250th Fourth of July. The question worth carrying into it isn’t whether America is great or whether it’s becoming great again. It’s a harder question: does what’s being built right now match what the Founding Fathers actually designed?
The documents are still there. Anyone can read them.
What the Founding Fathers Actually Built
The founders’ answer to the question of how to govern a free people was specific and deliberate. They distributed power across three co-equal branches. They enumerated what the federal government could do and reserved everything else to the states and the people via the 10th Amendment. They built a Senate confirmation process for executive appointments specifically because they didn’t trust any one man to staff the government alone. Federalist No. 76 explains why: the Senate “would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters.”
Most importantly, they built friction into the system on purpose. Federalist No. 51, written by James Madison: “Ambition must counteract ambition.” And: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The founders weren’t idealists. They were mechanism designers. They didn’t trust concentrated power in anyone’s hands, including their own. They built the system so they didn’t have to.
The founders built friction into the system deliberately — not as a flaw, but as the design.
What the Current Administration Built
President Donald Trump’s administration has moved faster and further on institutional restructuring than any administration in the modern era. The documented record:
- Schedule F, reinstated by executive order on January 20, 2025, reclassifies tens of thousands of federal civil service positions as at-will political appointments removable at the president’s discretion. The founders’ Appointments Clause in Article II gave the president appointment power with Senate advice and consent. Schedule F gives the executive branch removal power without it.
- DOGE operates as an executive instrument with no congressional charter, no confirmed director, and no statutory authority. It has accessed federal payment systems, personnel records, and agency databases. Congress authorized no such body. The founders gave Congress the power of the purse in Article I, Section 9. DOGE operates on a different theory.
- The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, decided June 29, 2026, extended presidential removal authority over independent agency heads, dismantling the Humphrey’s Executor precedent that had stood since 1935. Georgetown constitutional scholar Steve Vladeck called it “the most important separation-of-powers ruling of the twenty-first century.” The administration called it a restoration of the founders’ original design. The majority opinion cited Article II. The dissent cited the founders’ fear of concentrated executive power. Both sides read the same document.
Where the Founders and MAGA Actually Agree
The founders were also suspicious of permanent bureaucracies operating outside democratic accountability. That’s not a MAGA invention. Jefferson warned against it. Madison’s design was meant to prevent governance by unelected administrators who answered to no one the people had voted for. The administrative state that accumulated from the New Deal through the Great Society through the regulatory expansion of the 1970s would have been genuinely foreign to every man who signed the Constitution. Project 2025 states plainly that the goal is “a return to a constitutional structure that the Founding Fathers would have recognized.” On the diagnosis, they’re not wrong.
Seventy Claremont Institute alumni currently hold or have held positions in the Trump administration, according to reporting from April 2026. The Claremont school of conservative thought holds that the founders’ republic is “close to the best possible regime” and that the administrative state represents a fundamental departure from it. That’s a serious intellectual position with serious primary source documentation behind it. It deserves a serious answer, not a dismissal.
On the diagnosis that the administrative state departed from the founding design, the primary documents offer genuine support.
The Tension That Doesn’t Resolve Cleanly
Here’s where the honest audit gets uncomfortable. The founders distributed power outward to check it. Checks and balances, enumerated powers, Senate confirmation, an independent judiciary. The current project concentrates power inward to wield it more effectively. Executive orders over legislation. Acting officials over confirmed appointees. Removal authority over independent regulators. The speed and the method are both centralization moves, even when the stated goal is decentralization.
That’s not a contradiction of the founding in every case. The founders gave the president significant executive power. Article II is real. But Madison’s warning in Federalist No. 51 wasn’t directed only at Congress or the courts. It was directed at the executive branch too. “Ambition must counteract ambition” is a warning about human nature inside any institution, including the one doing the restoring.
The question isn’t whether the administrative state needed to be checked. It did. The question is whether replacing unelected bureaucrats with unconfirmed political appointees answerable only to the president is what the founders had in mind when they wrote Article II. The text supports parts of the argument. The Federalist Papers complicate it.
The founders distributed power outward to check it; the current restructuring concentrates it inward to wield it.
What American Independence Actually Means at 250 Years
The men who signed the Declaration knew they might die for it. They were dismantling a 150-year-old colonial order with no guarantee of what would replace it. What they built over the following decade — the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers explaining their reasoning — was their attempt to answer the hardest question in political history: how do you build a government strong enough to protect liberty but not so strong that it becomes the thing liberty needs protecting from?
They didn’t fully solve it. They built a system designed to keep wrestling with it. That’s what American Independence actually means at 250 years: not a finished answer, but an argument the founders trusted future generations to keep having, with the documents as the referee.
The current administration is having that argument. So is the opposition. Raymond is watching both. The documents are still there. Anyone can read them. That’s the point.
Happy Independence Day!
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the founding fathers actually design for American government?
The founders built a system of distributed power: three co-equal branches, enumerated federal powers, a Bill of Rights limiting federal reach, and a 10th Amendment reserving everything else to the states and the people. James Madison explained the design in Federalist No. 51: “Ambition must counteract ambition.” The goal was to make concentrated power structurally difficult, not just legally prohibited.
How does MAGA’s vision of America compare to the founding fathers’ blueprint?
MAGA’s intellectual foundation — particularly through Claremont Institute thinking now represented by 70 alumni in the Trump administration argues that the administrative state that grew from the New Deal onward was itself a departure from the founders’ design. On that diagnosis, the founders’ documents offer real support. The tension comes in the method: the founders distributed power outward to check it, while the current restructuring concentrates executive authority to wield it. Both claims have primary source documentation. Neither resolves cleanly.
What is the administrative state and did the founders create it?
The administrative state refers to the network of federal agencies, regulators, and career bureaucrats who implement federal policy outside direct electoral accountability. The founders did not create it. The Constitution gave Congress all legislative power and the president executive power, with a confirmation process for appointments. The modern administrative state grew primarily through New Deal-era legislation in the 1930s and regulatory expansion in the 1970s. Whether it represents a constitutional departure or a legitimate evolution is the core question in the current restructuring debate.
What did Madison mean by “ambition must counteract ambition”?
In Federalist No. 51, Madison argued that the only reliable check on political power is competing political power. He designed the three-branch system so that each branch’s natural self-interest would prevent the others from accumulating too much authority. It was mechanism design, not idealism.
What does American Independence mean at 250 years?
The founders declared independence from a system that had stopped serving the people it was supposed to protect. What they built afterward was a framework for keeping the argument going, with the Constitution as the referee. At 250 years, American Independence means the argument is still alive. The documents are still the referee. Whether the current restructuring honors that framework or tests its limits is the question July 4th, 2026 puts on the table.
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