When Did Republicans Stop Believing in Limited Government?

There was a time when the conservative response to an expensive, intrusive federal program was relatively straightforward: Spend less. Tax less. Regulate less. Let people keep more of what they earn.

Increasingly, however, a different philosophy is competing for the mantle of conservatism.

The welfare state exists, the argument goes, so conservatives should use it for conservative purposes. Government already subsidizes certain choices, so Republicans should redirect those subsidies toward choices they prefer. The Left uses government to advance its vision of society, so the Right should become equally comfortable wielding government power to advance its own.

That philosophy is now colliding with family policy.

The Trump administration is reportedly drafting a proposal that would allow certain married couples with a stay-at-home parent to receive federal child-care subsidies through the existing Child Care and Development Fund. The roughly $12 billion program currently helps lower- and moderate-income parents obtain child care so they can work, attend school, or receive job training. Under the draft proposal, a new category of “parent-based childcare” would allow one married parent to receive assistance for caring for his or her own child while the other spouse works at least 35 hours per week. The proposal reportedly originated in the White House and has been championed by Vice President JD Vance. It remains a draft and could change.

Supporters call that reform, but it raises a much more fundamental question: Why should Washington be paying Americans to arrange their families one way or another in the first place?

Expanding Welfare Is Not Welfare Reform

The defense I increasingly hear from people on the Right goes something like this: The welfare state already exists. Conservatives do not have the votes to abolish it. Existing child-care subsidies favor families using outside child care over families with a parent staying home. Therefore, allowing stay-at-home parents to receive the money merely corrects an existing distortion.

There is an internal logic to that argument. There is also a rather GLARING problem with it.

Expanding eligibility for welfare is still expanding welfare.

The existing Child Care and Development Fund was structured around helping eligible parents work or pursue education and training. The reported proposal would make the same pool of money available to qualifying married households when one parent instead remains home with the child. About 80 percent of the 870,000 families currently receiving these subsidies are headed by single working parents, and critics of the proposal have warned that adding new recipients without adding money could leave existing recipients competing for the same limited funds.

But my objection is more fundamental than how the money is divided.

Raising children is enormously valuable. So is marriage. So is having mothers and fathers actively involved in their children’s lives. None of that means the federal government should pay people for doing it.

The original subsidy may itself be objectionable, but when government has distorted one side of a decision, the limited-government answer is not necessarily to create an equal and opposite distortion.

Two subsidies do not make a free market.

And the inability to abolish an existing program today does not require conservatives to expand it tomorrow. Oppose the expansion. Make the argument for reducing the program. Build the constituency necessary to do so. Win the votes.

Political difficulty does not transform the opposite of limited government into limited government.

It Is Still Not Yours to Give

This debate reminds me of the famous lesson commonly attributed to Congressman Davy Crockett and popularized as Not Yours to Give.

The historical details of the later-published story have been disputed, so it should not be treated as a verbatim historical transcript. But the principle it popularized remains worth considering.

In the story, Crockett supports an appropriation to help families devastated by a fire. His constituent Horatio Bunce challenges him, not because helping those families is wrong, but because compassion does not transform taxpayers’ money into a politician’s personal charity fund.

His objection is wonderfully simple:

“It is not the amount, Colonel, that I complain of; it is the principle.”

And then comes the warning:

“If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all.”

That distinction seems increasingly foreign to modern politics.

A politician who believes stay-at-home motherhood is valuable can donate his own money to families making that choice. He can support charities that help parents remain home. Churches, communities, families, and private organizations can promote marriage, parenthood, and any number of virtues.

But taking money from taxpayers and redistributing it according to a politician’s preferred conception of the good life is not generosity.

That is government.

And there is a reason Not Yours to Give warns about what happens when the principle becomes simply that politicians may spend public money whenever they identify a sufficiently worthy recipient. The account warns that such reasoning opens a door to favoritism because there will always be another sympathetic person, worthwhile activity, or socially desirable outcome that government can subsidize.

The hardest test of limited-government principles isn’t opposing government programs you despise. It is opposing government subsidies for things you love.

I believe marriage is good. I believe strong families are indispensable to a healthy society. I believe children generally benefit enormously from having engaged mothers and fathers. But none of those beliefs answers the constitutional question of whether Washington should tax one American to subsidize another American for living according to them.

That is why constitutional limits matter. If self-proclaimed “conservatives” establish the principle that government should use public money to promote our preferred conception of family life, we should not be surprised when a future government uses precisely the same power to promote a conception of family, morality, or society that we find objectionable.

Political power changes hands. The principle has to survive the election.

What Happened to the Limited-Government Right?

This is the part I find particularly disappointing.

I have spent years working in and around the limited-government movement. I personally know many activists who have spent careers talking about constitutional government, fiscal restraint, free markets, and individual liberty.

These aren’t abstract people to me. In many cases, they are people I respect, have worked alongside, and have regarded as allies in the fight to constrain government. And I am increasingly watching some of those same people rationalize policies that would have been immediately recognizable as big government not very long ago.

The justification almost always comes back to some version of: The government is already doing it, so our side might as well make government work for us.

That mentality worries me far beyond this particular proposal.

Because once that becomes the governing philosophy of the Right, what exactly is left of limited government?

If government already subsidizes industries, subsidize ours. If government already manipulates markets, manipulate them toward our preferred outcome. If government already redistributes wealth, make sure our constituencies get their share. If government already engages in social engineering, engineer society toward conservative values.

Follow that logic to its conclusion, and there is no meaningful argument over the proper size and scope of government anymore. There is only an argument over who controls it and who benefits from it.

Conservatism by Influencer

I am equally concerned about how rapidly this transformation is being sold online as the new definition of “conservatism”.

Social media has created an entire political ecosystem in which influencers can acquire enormous audiences and effectively become ideological gatekeepers without ever having to grapple seriously with constitutional limits, public finance, economics, or the consequences of the government powers they advocate.

A policy gets branded “pro-family,” “America First,” “populist,” or sufficiently hostile to something the Left supports, and suddenly skepticism of government intervention is treated as some antiquated “establishment” position.

That is a remarkable inversion.

People who spent years advocating limited government are now supposedly the establishment because they continue to advocate limited government, while expanding federal benefits is presented as the bold new conservative alternative.

And people are buying it hook, line, and sinker.

That should concern anyone who believes conservatism is supposed to represent something more substantive than loyalty to whichever policies are currently popular among influential personalities on the Right.

An influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers can call redistribution “pro-family policy.” That doesn’t change what the government is doing.

A podcast can call industrial policy “economic nationalism.” That doesn’t repeal the laws of economics.

A viral post can call a new subsidy “reform.” That doesn’t make government smaller.

Labels CANNOT substitute for principles. And conservatism becomes essentially meaningless if the definition changes every time an influential person discovers a new government power he would enjoy controlling.

You Cannot Outbid the Socialists

There is a practical problem with this transformation too: You cannot outbid the Left.

Once Republicans accept that government’s proper role is to distribute benefits in order to produce preferred social outcomes, the disagreement with the Left becomes mostly a bidding war.

Republicans offer a benefit for stay-at-home parents. Someone else offers paid parental leave. Then larger child allowances. Then universal child care. Then housing subsidies. Then expanded health benefits. Then another payment.

Where does the limited-government Republican stand in that competition? Offering slightly less? Redistributing the money to a different constituency?

That is the strategic dead end of attempting to build a “conservative” welfare state.

The Republican Party has spent years warning about socialism and an expanding dependency on government. If its alternative becomes another collection of subsidies, benefits, industrial policies and government interventions directed toward constituencies Republicans prefer, the philosophical distinction becomes increasingly difficult to identify.

Seemingly, the disagreement is no longer whether government should manage society. It is over who gets to manage it.

And We Are Doing This While Going Broke

All of this would be concerning even if Washington were awash in money.

It isn’t.

CBO projected a $1.9 trillion federal deficit for fiscal year 2026, with debt held by the public reaching 101 percent of GDP. Mandatory spending alone is estimated at approximately $4.5 trillion this year and is projected to reach $7 trillion by 2036.

Through the first ten months of FY 2026, the federal government had already accumulated a $1.8 trillion deficit. Yet somehow the political conversation continues to revolve around discovering new things Washington can do for us.

At some point, fiscal conservatism has to mean something more than administering an enormous welfare state somewhat differently from Democrats. But even if this particular proposal added nothing to the deficit, my fundamental objection would remain.

Government spending isn’t justified merely because money has already been appropriated.

If a program is misguided, shrink it. If government is distorting the market, remove the distortion. If Americans are struggling economically, ask what government is doing to make housing, energy, health care, food and child care more expensive before creating another federal benefit to compensate them for those costs.

I Miss the TEA Party

I increasingly find myself longing for the days of the TEA Party.

Not because that movement always lived up to its rhetoric. It certainly didn’t. But at least conservatives purported to agree on the direction government should move.

Washington spends too much. Washington taxes too much. Washington borrows too much. Washington regulates too much. Washington DOES too much.

The answer was supposed to be less.

Today, parts of the Right increasingly offer a different answer: government can remain enormous, interventionist, and redistributionist so long as “conservatives” are directing its power toward the correct ends.

That isn’t the philosophy that attracted me to limited government. And watching people I have known and respected throughout my work fall into that mentality is profoundly disappointing.

I don’t expect ideological perfection. Politics necessarily involves compromise, incremental victories, and accepting that we cannot abolish every objectionable government program tomorrow. But there is a vast difference between failing to shrink government as quickly as we would like and convincing ourselves that expanding government has somehow become conservative.

We should at least remember which direction we are supposed to be pushing.

Let Families Keep Their Money

There is a genuinely limited-government family policy available. Let families KEEP more of what they earn.

Reduce taxes and spending. Remove regulations that unnecessarily raise the cost of housing, energy, health care and child care. Eliminate government favoritism and barriers to work and entrepreneurship. Create an economy in which families have greater financial freedom to decide for themselves whether both parents work, one stays home, grandparents help with child care, or they make some arrangement Washington never contemplated.

That approach does not require politicians to decide which families deserve a check. It REQUIRES politicians to surrender power.

There is an enormous philosophical difference between allowing a family to keep its own money and taxing Americans so Washington can redistribute that money to families whose decisions politicians want to encourage.

One empowers families. The other empowers government.

The alternative to Democratic socialism cannot be a Republican welfare state, complete with its own subsidies, favored constituencies, and government-approved social outcomes.

Conservatives should defend marriage. Celebrate motherhood and fatherhood. Encourage strong families. Support private institutions that cultivate virtue. But believing something is good does not mean believing Washington should subsidize it.

That distinction was the entire point of the lesson popularized by Not Yours to Give. And it leaves today’s purportedly limited-government conservatives with a question worth answering:

Is it actually government’s money to give?

If our response to the Left’s ever-expanding government is simply to seize the machinery and point it toward our preferred objectives, we haven’t rejected their premise. We’ve accepted it.

We just changed who gets the check.

The answer to a government check with a donkey stamped on it cannot be another government check with an elephant stamped on it.