The following is an excerpt from Blaze Media’s Capitol Hill Brief email newsletter:

While most eyes in Washington remain fixed on the House’s impeachment drama, a story about reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy might have slipped under your radar.

In an interview with the Washington Examiner published on Monday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she has shrunk the overall size of the Department of Education by 600 staff positions during her time at its helm, bringing the total number from 4,300 to 3,700. “Well, I have long advocated for the notion that it would be great to work myself out of a job,” she said.

While cutting 600 positions is not the total elimination of the department that many on the Right have called for since its creation in 1979, it’s nevertheless a step toward a smaller department and a smaller administrative state.

The administrative state, the federal leviathan, the Swamp: The monstrous, centralized, bureaucratic, entrenched decision-making apparatus within the federal government that seems to answer only to itself.

On Sunday night's episode of Life, Liberty & Levin, LevinTV host Mark Levin and Claremont Institute senior fellow and University of Nevada, Reno, Professor John Marini talked about how that Swamp got to be so deep and how things are actually worse now than most people realize.

"The administrative state is such a pervasive phenomenon that most people think of it simply as the bureaucracy," Marini explained. "But it's really much more pervasive than that, because it not only is established in the institutions that are created by government, but it also has a kind of authority ... that allows politicians to defer to that authority and relieves them, really, of making the kind of political decisions that they need to make about things like making laws."

The problem with this scenario is not just that the administrative state mechanism is teeming with progressive ideology, regardless of who controls Congress or the White House, but that its very existence runs contrary to the Constitution.

"There's absolutely no authority for the administrative realm in the Constitution," Marini explained. "Every authority that is in the Constitution is a political authority, so it derives either from the legislative, executive, or judicial powers."

"Now, every government has to have an administration, obviously, but the administration that we have now — and the reason why it's sometimes called rational administration — is not merely carrying out the political will; it's establishing its own authority to carry out, to deal with, problems that those who have political authority are no longer dealing with," Marini explained. "They've, in a certain way, turned those decisions over to those who have specialized knowledge."

One of the biggest shifts towards this model occurred during the "Great Society" program push of the Lyndon Johnson era, when Marini said Congress went from being a lawmaking body to a "administrative oversight body."

"There's no question that this is all part of the progressive legacy" and the progressive experiment to "replace civil society" with technocratic decision-making from a modern administrative government, Marini explained. "In a certain way ... that extends all the way down almost to the family — that every other kind of social organization that once dealt with the problems that are now handled by bureaucracies, all of those things have been turned over, you might say, to professionals."

Levin and Marini talked about the fact that the descriptions "expert" and "professionals" are really only "credentials that give them the authority for that. That is not the same as knowledge."

Marini also added that this kind of thinking was a far cry from the kind of governance initially intended for the United States. Among the American Founders, he explained, "there would have been no substitute for making these moral decisions based on human reason. There's no way that you can delegate that to some other body."

Have you ever wondered why it seems like Congress is really run by staffers fresh out of undergraduate political science programs and lobbyists, while it barely keeps pace in overseeing the executive bureaucracy? There are several reasons why.

Just to put things in perspective, Daniel Horowitz has already done some of the math on this issue (emphasis added):

The size of Congress is .001 percent of the executive branch and is dwarfed even by the size of individual executive departments. Even if we don’t include the cost of the federal programs and just factor in the discretionary spending to fuel the executive bureaucracy, it is still over 300 times larger than Congress. The budget of the Department of Education alone is 15 times larger than that of the entire legislative branch. Whenever you wonder why there is no voice for the forgotten American amidst the special interests fueling harmful government policies, just remember that even the few members of Congress who intuitively sympathize with us feel they lack the time, resources, knowledge, and energy to deal with it.

One of those resources is staff, which has become more and more scant in recent years.

A 2010 report from the Sunlight foundation found overall decreases in congressional policy job positions over the previous 25 years as well as real wage decreases for those who had the remaining jobs. The Congressional Research Service reports also show those average wages decreasing from 2009 to 2013.

You know who doesn’t offer meager pay to people with policy chops? K Street lobby shops. A 2013 study found that low pay was a driving force for many congressional staffers leaving their posts. Meanwhile, the numbers show that the average legislative staffer of Capitol Hill experience can typically forgo the long hours and relatively low pay of a Hill job by cashing in as a lobbyist after just a few years of experience.

So staff turnover in Congress ends up being higher than you might think. A 2017 report from the Congressional Management Foundation found that “there are no staff positions in Senate or House committees or personal offices with a median tenure of more than four years. That means most of the key staffers on Capitol Hill — the ones who directly support the policy and constituent engagement work of Senators and Representatives — are fairly new to their jobs.”

Combine that with the fact that the average House member’s constituency was almost twice as big in 2010 as it was in 1975, and you start to get the picture.

Why does this all matter? Because if you want a team to do anything successfully, you need to attract and retain talent. In order to do that, you need to provide the kind of compensation that will keep talent from leaving once they get a little experience under their belts. Otherwise, you end up with systemic brain drain.

This pay gap not only keeps the monster administrative state way ahead of the slim legislative branch, it also increases the Swamp’s overall swampiness by further empowering agenda-driven lobbyists to fill experience and manpower gaps on the Hill.

This doesn’t mean that we would have to explode the legislative branch’s budget in order for it to adequately compete. But legislators could take a revenue-neutral stance of decreasing the money for executive staff by the same amount they increase the legislative staff budget. Or they could get creative, take a page from the Trump administration, and instate a two-to-one policy, where every new legislative staff position means two fewer career bureaucrat jobs in administrative agencies.

The simple fact is that the federal government was never supposed to be as big in size or scope as it is today. Now that we’re confronted with a leviathan of this magnitude, we’re going to need to spend some more money on congressional staff if we ever want to shrink it.