Have a read:  277,000: Fed Regulators Have More Than Quadrupled Since 1960.  It’s not good news.  Excerpt:

In 2015, the U.S. government employed more than 277,000 regulators. To put that number in perspective, it’s 50,000 more workers than General Motors Co. employs throughout the entire world.

We’ve all heard of the regulatory agencies that constitute the “fourth branch” of government. It has cost our economy over $100 billion during the Obama administration.

But it wasn’t always like this. We haven’t always lived in a world where unelected bureaucrats could fine a man $55,000 for taking photos of his friend’s art project.

Thankfully, Susan Dudley from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Melinda Warren from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, have tracked the growth of federal regulatory agencies, allowing us to see how we got into the predicament we’re in now.

Here’s the fun part; take a look at the Constitution (unlike the Federal Register, it’s a pretty quick read) and find any authorization in there for a Department of Education, or Commerce, or Energy, or any one of a host of other Imperial agencies.

Oh, plenty of political candidates have sought and won election promising to rein in the Imperial monolith.  So how are we doing on that?

It is the nature of government to grow ever larger, ever more intrusive, ever more expensive, and ever more corrupt.  The Greeks and the Romans learned this the hard way.  One would like to think we could learn from their example, but there’s little encouragement to be had.