The president's recent executive order aimed at the "deconstruction of the administrative state" will require changing "the rules of the game," argues Ned Ryun at thefederalist.com:

If there is to be real change in our form of government, the Trump administration needs to avoid the fatal flaw of previous Republican administrations: choosing to play the game by the Left's rules.

Nearly every Republican administration makes some changes, but mostly lightly exfoliates the elephant of the State. These are temporary gains at best, small pauses in the seemingly inevitable march of government dominance.

Ryun contends that it is unrealistic to expect that a relatively small number of presidential appointees "can win against 2.8 million federal government employees who have a vested interest in absolutely nothing changing," and who, by the way, donate heavily to Democrats.

Trump's election has thrown a wrench into The System. But it's not entirely clear that even he or his advisors truly understand what they're up against.

Ryun's "advice to President Trump" includes the following:

Trump's hiring freeze is a good step in the right direction. It stops one of the reinforcing loops. But he needs to reverse the loop and cut the federal workforce by no less than 25 percent in four years. Trump should then consolidate and shut down departments.

Once departments are shut down, bulldoze the buildings to the ground. Shatter them, plow them under, then build beautiful parks, Liberty Parks, over where the departments used to stand.

The Trump executive order charges the director of the Office of Management and Budget with developing a plan for eliminating "unnecessary agencies, components of agencies, and agency programs," as well as considering whether certain functions and programs "would be better left to State or local governments or to the private sector through free enterprise."

How we get from here to there is the question.

Denis Kleinfield at newsmax.com notes that Trump's proposed elimination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other liberal favorites "sent much of the mainstream media into another tirade of he is a madman and out of control," but Kleinfield asks what else can be cut:

The question that seemed most relevant to me is how many more agencies in the federal government could President Trump abolish?

To figure out that I went looking for a complete list of all the federal governmental agencies.

The problem is that I couldn't find one.

An article from the Competitive Enterprise Institute [CEI] confirmed my discovery.

Referring to the Sourcebook of United States Executive Agencies, it said, "As bureaucracy sprawls, nobody can say with complete authority exactly how many federal agencies exist."

A new report put out by the CEI, subtitled "An Inventory of Regulatory Dark Matter" (more on that later), includes a table summarizing "How Many Federal Agencies Exist," listing eight different government estimates.  Not even the federal government knows how many federal government agencies there are, never mind how many contractors, rules, decrees, and the like there are, as the CEI report notes.

Mr. Kleinfield adds:

Even if we could figure out how many departments, agencies, commissions, councils, offices, groups, services, administrations, boards, centers, organization, programs, divisions, conferences and untold numbers of specifically named operations, there is another added complexity.

Most of them likely are doing the same job.

... And never forget, that behind every single federal spending program there is a politician getting both votes and campaign contributions out of it.

Consider the impact of Obamacare alone on the federal Leviathan, as reported by Politico after the law's passage:                                                                             

The Center for Health Transformation, founded by Newt Gingrich, recently estimated that the new law created as many as 159 new offices, agencies and programs. Republican staffers on the Joint Economic Committee determined that there were 47 bureaucratic entities.

But there's still more to this story.

Another CEI column, by Clyde Wayne Crews, considers the ubiquity of "regulatory dark matter":

It's becoming too easy for federal agencies to steer private activity without issuing "real" regulations anymore. Instead, we get regulatory dark matter – particularly as the economy becomes more technologically advanced.

Beyond the dozens of laws and thousands of federal rules and regulations that you can look up, agencies issue thousands of proclamations like memoranda, guidance documents, notices, circulars and administrative interpretations.

Crews lists examples such as the "Obamacare statutory mandate waivers" and "Labor Department 'administrator's interpretations'" and suggests:

Unless addressed, expect plenty [of] future guidance from new regulatory launchpads like the Dodd-Frank financial law[.] ...

If this kind of thing continues, the federal government may regulate remotely by issuing software patches[.] ...

No need to write real rules. Too much trouble; even boring.

The Trump administration has invoked "deconstruction of the administrative state"; if that's the plan, dark matter should be the main target.

Mr. Crews emphasizes that while "new regulation has essentially stopped under Trump," regulatory dark matter will be harder to rein in (emphasis original):

But agency creativity in skirting oversight and using even "darker" dark matter, like threats and warnings, will be their adaptation to regulatory reform.

Therefore, early on in the Trump administration, I hope we can establish the principle that all executive orders and all legislative overhauls aimed at "deconstructing the regulatory state" need to explicitly incorporate regulatory dark matter.

Kleinfield at Newsmax concludes:

President Trump has his work cut out for him. But his taking the lead in eliminating useless federal agencies proves he may be the sanest man in Washington, D.C.