Abolish the Commerce Department
If the Senate goes along with President-elect Donald Trump’s pick, then financier Howard Lutnick will be the next secretary of the Department of Commerce.
He should also be the last.
On Tuesday, Trump nominated Lutnick, a personal friend with deep ties to Wall Street who is also co-chairing Trump’s transition effort. In a statement on Truth Social, Trump said Lutnick would “will lead our Tariff and Trade agenda,” and Politico notes that Lutnick has been a defender of Trump’s plans to impose across-the-board tariffs. During an appearance on CNBC in September, Lutnick spelled it out clearly, saying “we should put tariffs on stuff we make and not put tariffs on stuff we don’t make.”
In other words, Lutnick aims to make it more difficult and expensive for many American businesses and consumers to engage in commerce, the very thing that he’s supposed to be overseeing. That contradiction reflects the Commerce Department’s own confused status—an amalgamation of programs and agencies that often have little to do with the exchange of goods and services, or seem determined to make the process more complicated than it needs to be.
Commerce, after all, is something that happens spontaneously, without government approval or direction. Americans are very good at commerce, and that has nothing to do with the fact that the federal government spends $121 billion on a department named after that activity. If the Commerce Department ceased existing tomorrow, we would still buy and sell things as if nothing had changed.
In fact, we’d probably buy and sell more things. As Lutnick seems keenly aware, one of the chief roles of the Commerce Department is to find quasi-economic rationales for the imposition of tariffs and other trade barriers. During Trump’s first term, it was the Commerce Department that cooked up the flawed studies explaining why steel and aluminum imports were a national security threat. The administration tried unsuccessfully to hide an even more embarrassing report claiming foreign-made cars were a threat too (thankfully those tariffs were never imposed).
If the president wants to impose economically damaging tariffs, he has that power—thanks to poor decisions by Congress. What we don’t need is an army of taxpayer-funded bureaucrats churning out reports that justify those delusions. Shut it down.
One might suspect that a large part of the Commerce Department’s portfolio would be focused on protecting Americans’ right to engage in commerce without undue coercion. That’s not true, because tha
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