I blogged yesterday on the high living IRS employees whose expense accounts include such items as $38,799 for staying at the Grand Hyatt.

Senator Orrin Hatch has written the IRS a note saying he is "frustrated" about this. Wonder how much effect that will have?

There is simply no way to change Washington without going right at the power of extra-constitutional agencies who are laws unto themselves, ruling by regulations, and spending our money imprudently.

And that is the most appealing thing about Donald Trump's cabinet nominations: many of them seem likely to cut down the power of the agencies they are appointed to run–a long overdue reform. Former Texas governor Rick Perry, nominee for the energy department, has even said that he would like to abolish that department.

Much fluttering of the liberal dovecotes.

Charles Krauthammer addresses this in a column headlined "Bonfire of the Agencies," in which he writes:

The left has been in equally high dudgeon that other Cabinet picks appear not to share the mission of the agency that they have been nominated to head. The horror! As if these agency missions are somehow divinely ordained. Why, they aren't even constitutionally ordained. The Department of Education, for example, was created by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 as a payoff to the teachers unions for their political support.

Now, teachers are wonderful. But teachers unions are there to protect benefits and privileges, not necessarily to improve schooling. Which is why they zealously defend tenure, protect their public-school monopoly and reflexively oppose school choice.

Conservatives have the odd view that the purpose of schooling — and therefore of the Department of Education — is to provide students with the best possible education. Hence Trump's nominee, Betsy DeVos, a longtime and passionate proponent of school choice, under whom the department will no longer be an arm of the teachers unions.

She is also less likely to allow the department's Office for Civil Rights to continue appropriating to itself the role of arbiter of social justice, micromanaging everything from campus sexual mores to the proper bathroom assignment for transgender students. If the mission of this department has been to dictate policy best left to the states and localities, it's about time the mission was changed.

Another pick that bodes well for reform is Scott Pruitt for EPA–as Oklahoma attorney general, Pruitt has challenged the overweening power of this agency in court numerous times.

The only way to limit government is to limit the power of these agencies.