Welcome back to Gray Matters, the podcast of the Seaboard and Grace Center for the study of the administrative state.

I'm Jace Linton, the Gray Center's Policy and Strategy Director. With me as always is Bennett Neuss,

our research director. Hi Bennett. Hi, Jayes. Good to be back.

Today, we're also joined by Ronald J. Pastrido. He's a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and

graduate dean and professor of politics at Hillsdale College. He's written a new article for

Claremont's D.C. Center for the American Way of Life called Government by the

Unelected, how it happened and how it might be tamed. And Claremont brands these articles as provocations.

So, RJ, what kind of reactions has your article provoked?

Hi, Jace. Good to be on. And, you know, I've gotten some attention,

I think, including from people in the administration whose actions I've sort of been trying to

translate to my students and other, you know, other interested readers. And that's, that's sort of the

story of how this piece got written. The Institute had asked me back over the summer in this

early months, I suppose, of the second Trump administration to speak to its interns and its fellows and kind of to organize and

tell the story of what was going on with all of the administration actions with regard to the

different agencies in the bureaucracy because as you know, the pace and the nature of

those actions was quite heavy. And, you know, the representation of them in the press was not clear,

not sympathetic at all, and surprisingly. And so essentially what I was asked to do is to

step back and explain what was going on with respect to this new effort to reign in the

administrative state. And I sort of took a look at the history of it. I looked at the courts

and how the courts had sort of helped build it up since the 1930s and had maybe more recently

taken a turn in the other direction. And then the various ways in which it appeared to me, the Trump

administration kind of, you know, in real time, was trying to maybe take advantage of that opportunity and, and push back even more.

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