Adam J. White joins Brian Anderson to discuss the “administrative state,” often described as the fourth branch of the federal government. Under the Obama administration, bureaucratic agencies were aggressivelyutilized to bypass congressional hostility to the progressive agenda.

In 2014, President Obama declared his “pen and phone” strategy: if the Republican-controlled Congress was unwilling to act on his priorities, he would sign executive orders directing federal agencies to enforce new rules or ignore existing ones. Environmental regulations, immigration reform, and Internet neutrality were just a few areas where the Obama administration directed agencies to make substantial policy changes.

Adam White is an attorney, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a contributing editor of City Journal. His story “Break the Bureaucracy” appeared in the Winter 2017 Issue.

Peter Cove joins Brian Anderson to discuss his new book Poor No More: Rethinking Dependency and the War on Poverty.

Declaring the War on Poverty in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson stated that the goal was to “cure poverty, and above all, prevent it.”

50 years later, most people would agree that the signature campaign of the “Great Society” has shown mixed results, at best: Despite spending over $20 trillion on anti-poverty programs, the official poverty rate has barely moved.

Peter Cove is the founder of America Works, the nation’s first for-profit, welfare-to-work company that has placed nearly 1 million people into employment. Peter first became involved in the fight against poverty when he moved to New York in 1965 to join the Anti-Poverty Operations Board, where he helped write federal grant proposals and managed local programs.

Find out more about Peter Cove’s book on Amazon.​