Opinion: Waving Farewell to the Bad Nanny State

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

As President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance take their oaths of office on Monday, they will represent a sharp turn for the government of the United States. They say the pendulum has always swung back and forth, to an extent, but this time, it swings far more than usual.

One of the many ways in which our government is finally changing is in the public’s clear repudiation of the Nanny State of the American Left, which has been largely in control of our government the New Deal in the 1930s.

But there are two aspects of this change too, and it’s critical to recognize both.

The Nanny State can be said to be the over-investment in government in the power to regulate human lives.

For good or ill, we decided that government should be able to set a minimum wage, then on its own, it went too far, with many states and cities demanding a minimum salary so high that it put employers out of business.

For good or ill, we decided that government should be able to set minimum workplace safety standards, then this too went too far, with OSHA, the ADA, the DOT’s Hours of Service regulations, and similar overreaches unnecessarily adding costs and risks that priced America out of reach for many business environments.

For good or ill, we decided that government should be able to demand that manufacturers ensure that their facilities, their products and their scrap not pollute the rivers, lakes, air and soil, and these state and federal EPAs then went too far, requiring costly processes that make it infinitely more desirable to invent the products here, but then have them manufactured abroad – in countries that don’t over-regulate factories to death like ours does.

As we have bled manufacturing jobs by the millions over the past generation or two, the United States have gradually realized that this Nanny State, however well-intentioned, needs to be tempered with an understanding of the Invisible Hand of the free market, and a recognition that our Founding Fathers designed a nation of severely limited government, a design that we’ve largely disregarded for the past century, to our eternal shame.

It’s not that the state can’t be a “nanny” at all – some of these goals are legitimate, and just need to be redesigned – simplified – with an eye to economic growth, to create individual opportunities for personal advancement for all working Americans.

We can ban real pollution without putting non-polluters out of business with our reporting, testing, and certification regimes. We can have safe transportation without forcing drivers to manage two sets of logs in order to make ends meet.

We just need our regulators to be people who themselves have worked in the private sector – “people who have met a payroll” as Republicans typically refer to them – because such people will understand the effects of crippling bureaucracy, and can temper these good intentions with practicality and a sense of proportion.

So, yes, this new administration is aiming to address that need, the goal of softening the “nanny” aspect of government, regulating where necessary while shredding the costly red tape. This is one aspect of the Trump II focus, perhaps best noted in the new Elon Musk team nicknamed DOGE.

But there is another aspect of this – in some ways more important, more shocking – and that is the fact that this Nanny has often not just over-regulated, but has regulated wrongly. On purpose. The fact that the government, in its illegal, unconstitutional overregulation, has not just enforced well-intentioned overstep, but has far too often used its power to force absolutely destructive, intentionally malevolent assaults on every element of society, from bank loans to school sports, from the practice of medicine to the management of public parks, from the licensing of government lands for energy development to the authorization and restriction of manufacturers of everything from home appliances to vehicles.

The world of fiction, and particularly the horror genre, is replete with stories of the “bad nanny” – a person unwisely hired to care for children who not only exaggerates his or her authority for reward and punishment, but who commits actual evil against his or her charges.

In this respect, the bad nanny state of recent decades has exceeded even the worst fictional account. No book, movie or TV series has ever gone as far as the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Education – oh, probably every one of them, truth be told.

The Department of Education has forced schools – both public and private – to allow boys to compete in girls’ sports, not only robbing deserving girls of the honors, scholarships, and financial rewards they deserve, but also causing crippling injuries; all because the “trans” activists have gained control of so many state and federal agencies. This isn’t a matter of mere overreach; this is sheer evil.

Interconnected with this one is the trans activism in general, and how it has gained currency, and even legal status, changing the way that mental illness is addressed. If a child or teen is suffering from depression, gender dysphoria could be one of its manifestations. Only an evil movement could choose to apply the powers of government to drive the psychiatric/psychological profession, the teachers, the medical profession and the pharmaceutical profession, not to combat and cure this illness, but rather, to support this gender dysphoria and further it by horrific surgical transformations. It has become a multi-billion dollar business, and has completely destroyed these entire industries in the process, as well as destroying the minds and futures of the poor patients they have thus permanently disfigured.

Then there’s the outrageous assault on energy, and on everything that energy can be twisted to affect, largely based on the ludicrous cult of “climate change” – the ridiculous idea that carbon dioxide, one of the building blocks of all life on earth, is somehow destructive.

Based on that one, single, ridiculous idea, the Left’s operatives in both the legislature and the bureaucracy have issued bans on oil, natural gas, and coal. At a time when the world would love to buy more of this energy from the United States, both creating jobs here and saving lives abroad, the Biden-Harris executive orders and the regulatory slow-walking of permits have crippled our ability to meet these energy needs. Equally destructive is their insistence on massive government subsidies for the utterly inefficient technologies of wind and solar power, wasting millions of acres and trillions of dollars chasing an unscientific dream.

But the sources of energy alone aren’t the end of the problem. The Left has also used its termites in government to issue outrageous related restrictions throughout every branch of the economy. Big blue cities ban glass walls and gas stoves in office buildings; the EPA bans natural gas furnaces, CAFÉ standards are revised to put automobile companies out of business unless they abandon the internal combustion engine and switch to unpractical and unsustainable EVs.

Unlike our first group of examples, these must not be confused with mere overreach.

These are examples of true abuses of government, designed to intentionally force objectively destructive, tyrannical changes on the American way of life. First they used their control of textbook publishing and the pop culture to spread these outrageous concepts, then they used their control of the bureaucracy to lock these policies into law, forcing manufacturers to stop making products that work, banning home builders from installing them.

It’s easy to lump all this together as “the nanny state,” but there is an enormous difference between how you design fair Hours of Service rules for truckers, and how to prevent rogue agencies from implementing overtly malicious policies due to hostility to nature itself and a luddite desire to quickly and intentionally lower the American standard of living across the board.

As the second Trump Administration takes office, a big part of their job will be recognizing these two very different aspects of the Nanny State, addressing the one by tempering it with logic and practicality, and addressing the other by necessarily destroying it, root and branch.

The second Trump Administration has their work cut out for them.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo