Big Government

One Thing Every Modern President Has in Common: They All Spent More Than the Last Guy

The vibe shift that really matters—a reduction in the size, scope, and spending of government—hasn't happened, and America is worse off for it.

Nick Gillespie | 4.19.2026 6:30 AM

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(Adani Samat)

One of the most persistent and misleading fallacies in politics is that successive presidents represent a clear and decisive change in the direction of the country, especially when they are from different parties. Republican Richard Nixon barely squeaking into office in a tight three-way race meant that Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson and "the New Deal Coalition that had dominated presidential politics for 36 years" were as beaten down as hippies at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, right? And when Ronald Reagan glided to a surprising landslide in 1980 over Jimmy Carter, it meant that the forces of free-spending, socially liberal Big Government had been kicked to the curb by the Second Coming of Calvin Coolidge.

Such clichéd interpretations flatter the newly ascendant group in power (we won because we're new and vibrant!) while comforting the losers (we only tanked because the times changed). But the reality is always less stark. Far from breaking with or ending LBJ's free-spending and expansive vision of government mucking around in more and more of everyday life, Nixon instead completed the regulatory agenda of the Great Society by creating new and mostly terrible agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), and many others that extended the reach of the federal government into everyday life. His  "Vietnamization" push in Southeast Asia was a continuation of existing policy, not a break from it. (Interestingly, all three major presidential candidates in 1968 campaigned on some variation........

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