Between roughly 1890 and 1920, a generation of American reformers fundamentally transformed their understanding of what government was for — and in doing so, set the country on a trajectory that would have been unrecognizable to the founders. The Progressive movement's intellectual legacy is the administrative state: the vast network of federal agencies, bureaus, commissions, and regulatory bodies that today touch virtually every dimension of American life.
The Progressive Critique of the Founders
The Progressives were not shy about their disagreements with the founding generation. Woodrow Wilson, the movement's most intellectually sophisticated leader, argued explicitly that the founders' Constitution was obsolete. In his 1908 book Constitutional Government in the United States, Wilson wrote that government "is not a machine, but a living thing" that must adapt to its environment like a Darwinian organism.
The separation of powers, Wilson argued, was an impediment to efficient governance. The idea of fixed, enumerated powers was a relic of a simpler age. What modern industrial society required was expert administration — government by trained specialists who could manage the complex economy without the friction of constitutional limits.
Herbert Croly, whose 1909 book The Promise of American Life became a Progressive manifesto, similarly argued that Hamiltonian national power should be deployed for Jeffersonian democratic ends — using a strong central government to achieve greater equality and social welfare.
The Birth of the Administrative State
The Progressive Era saw the creation of the first major federal regulatory agencies: the Interstate Commerce Commission (expanded 1906), the Federal Trade Commission (1914), the Federal Reserve (1913). These agencies combined functions the founders had deliberately separated — they made rules (legislative), enforced them (executive), and adjudicated violations (judicial), all within a single institution.
This combination was precisely what Madison had called the "very definition of tyranny" in Federalist No. 47. But the Progressives argued that efficiency and expertise required it.
The New Deal of the 1930s dramatically accelerated this process, creating dozens of new agencies and establishing the constitutional doctrine — in cases like Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) — that courts should defer to agencies' interpretations of their own statutory authority.
The Nondelegation Problem
The founders expected Congress to make the law. Article I vests "all legislative powers herein granted" in Congress. But the administrative state depends on Congress delegating vast legislative authority to executive agencies — authorizing them to fill in the details of broad statutory frameworks.
The Supreme Court struck down two New Deal statutes in 1935 on nondelegation grounds but has not done so since. Justice Thomas has argued forcefully that the Court's dormant nondelegation doctrine should be revived, and recent decisions — including West Virginia v. EPA (2022) — have shown renewed skepticism of agencies claiming sweeping authority without clear congressional authorization.
What the Founders Would Have Thought
The administrative state poses a fundamental challenge to the founding design in three ways:
First, it concentrates power in ways the Constitution was designed to prevent. When a single agency can write, enforce, and adjudicate rules, the separation of powers becomes a formality.
Second, it is largely unaccountable to voters. Agency officials are not elected. They are difficult to remove. They operate behind layers of bureaucratic insulation from democratic oversight.
Third, it assumes a level of governmental competence and benevolence that the founders explicitly rejected. The founders designed their system on the assumption that government officials would pursue their own interests and that power would be abused if unchecked. Progressive governance assumes the opposite.
Progressivism's Lasting Influence
The administrative state is now so embedded in American governance that dismantling it is politically unthinkable in the short term. But understanding its origins — and its tension with founding principles — is essential to any honest assessment of where America is and how it got here.
The Progressive reformers were responding to real problems: industrial monopoly, unsafe food and drugs, financial instability. But their solutions came at a cost that is only now being fully reckoned with: a vast transfer of power from elected representatives to unaccountable experts, and a systematic erosion of the constitutional architecture the founders built.