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President Trump’s economists just put out a report.
And it has a number in it I want every conservative in America to see.
They call it the bureaucrat tax.
It’s calculated by adding up local fees, permit delays, zoning restrictions, and code mandates. When you stack them all up, they add over $100,000 to the cost of building a single home.
The bureaucrat tax should reset our understanding of housing economics. It is making the cost of a new house 24% higher and adds 41% to the cost of building an apartment.
Nearly half the cost of an apartment is getting government permission, as reflected in the tax and its name.
So that tells us what is not the primary driver of the out-of-this-world, hard-to-afford housing prices. It’s not lumber, labor, greedy developers, or dastardly landlords.
It’s the permission system.
A builder submits plans. Every code met. Every box checked. Every requirement satisfied. He can still be denied. Not because anything is wrong. Because many planning boards across the country have discretionary authority to say no for any reason — or no reason at all.
That’s the racket. That’s who’s charging you $100,000 to own a home.
And the President’s own economists just put it in writing. Very encouraging to see.
What Your Gut Already Knew
Something always felt off about the standard housing story, didn’t it?
The left tells you it’s greedy landlords, Wall Street, or dastardly developers. That “late stage” capitalism is why a 40 year old middle income millenial can’t afford a starter home. We are told that the answer is more government programs, more subsidies, more “affordability” mandates written by people who have never poured a foundation in their lives.
Your gut said no, and it was right.
President Trump’s own economists are confirming what working Americans have felt in their bones for thirty years. The housing crisis is not natural; it’s man-made scarcity. Built permit by permit, board meeting by board meeting, by a professional class that decided their home values mattered more than your kid being able to buy one.
The answer is less government. Not more.
Cut the bureaucrat tax, the report says, and we could add 13.2 million homes to the housing stock. No subsidies. No federal housing projects. No Mamdani-AOC-style wealth transfers.
Just getting the government out of the way and returning to the American way of doing things: building.
What About Immigration?
Now, let me address the elephant in the room.
A lot of good people on our side believe the housing crisis is primarily an immigration story. The theory is that if you close the border, deport the lawbreakers, and housing fixes itself.
The border fight is righteous. I’m with you. Every reason to close it. Every reason to deport criminals. Every reason to enforce the law we already have on the books. I’m down to clown. But President Trump’s own economists were honest. They named two drivers of the housing crisis, and one is much bigger than the other.
The Biden-era immigration surge pushed real house prices up 3.2% from 2022 to 2024. For sure, immigration drives demand and matters.
But also, the bureaucrat tax has been in place since before Biden and has been compounding in effects for decades. If you’re thinking clearly about it, it seems obvious that a two-year demand surge is a secondary-order cause of the primary. The bureaucrat tax is an ever-worsening century-old drag on every family that has ever tried to buy a home in this country.
I’m not asking you to stop caring about the border. I’m asking you to see the bigger villain standing right behind it. I hope President Trump meets every success in his immigration policy—as I understand it—but let’s not kid ourselves. We won’t solve housing without substantial reform to how we build in America.
A Hundred-Year-Old Racket
It’s key to understand that this villain isn’t new.
The planning class driving the bureaucrat tax didn’t show up in 2021. They didn’t show up with Obama. They’ve been at this since the 1920s — Progressive Era bureaucrats who decided that experts with degrees should decide where you live, what you build, and who gets in. A hundred years of stacking rules on rules. A hundred years of telling American families that their land isn’t really theirs until a board signs off, getting worse and worse, more hubris and power hungry year after year.
That’s the system President Trump’s economists just put a $100,000 price tag on.
Think of it like the FDA, the NIH, and all the agencies that have lost so much public credibility since COVID. Prior to 2020, most Americans thought of them as a largely benign institution. Until we realized they were so profoundly corrupted by their powers that they couldn’t be trusted.
I’m here to tell you today: the same philosophy that created the FDA created your local planning board, and they are just as human, just as prone to the same errors of power and miscalculation.
President Trump is Making Moves
You gotta give President Trump his due on this report because they kill it.
He ended Biden’s coercive green-energy mandates at HUD and USDA — the CEA estimates that alone shaves $31,000 off the cost of every federally financed home.
He buried the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which forced localities to waste resources drafting so-called equity plans just to qualify for federal dollars. Good riddance.
That’s real progress on the part of the problem Washington actually controls.
And the report doesn’t stop there. It lays out a blueprint every state legislature in America should be reading.
By-right approval. If your plans comply with the code, you get your permit. Full stop. No vote. No public hearing. No neighbor-pressure campaign where the loudest person in the room gets to veto your property rights.
Capped timelines. 60 days maximum. The bureaucrat doesn’t get to run out the clock.
Capped fees. The permission fee can’t be weaponized as a back-door tax on building.
Third-party inspections. So a builder isn’t held hostage waiting six months for the one county inspector.
The point of all of it is to make the permission system predictable. That matters more than it sounds. Uncertainty is a tax too. When a builder can’t know whether his permit takes six weeks or three years, he prices that risk into the project — or he walks away. And the families who needed that housing never know what they lost. When government inspectors take forever, it adds cost and so on.
But the Report Doesn’t Go Far Enough
These are good reforms. I think we’d be far better off if more states implemented them. I’ll be honest, though, they don’t go far enough. They make the permission system faster but they don’t end it.
And the permission system is the problem.
The real fix — the one that unlocks thirteen million homes — is older than zoning itself. It’s called property rights. It’s both a simple, more radical, and a more conservative solution to unlocking those 12 million new homes.
Returning to property rights means returning the core job of local government to protecting people from genuine harm, not centrally planning all land in their area. They should be making sure your neighbor doesn’t build a tallow-rendering plant next door and flooding your neighborhood with a smell that imposes real costs on people.
But gosh darn it, let a family build an accessory dwelling unit to house a grandmother without having to beg a board for permission. Let that builder add a few units to his mixed-use development plan.
That’s not radical. That’s America before the Progressive Era got its hands on your deed.
Texas Isn’t Waiting
Here’s the good news. Some red states aren’t waiting on Washington.
In 2025, Texas passed the most sweeping pro-housing reform in its modern history. Four bills. Signed by Governor Abbott. Every one of them is tearing through the permission system, choking the state’s fastest-growing cities.
The headliner is Senate Bill 840. It ended the rezoning shakedown in one stroke. If you own commercial land in a major Texas city, you can build housing on it — by right. No public hearing. No supermajority vote. No years of limbo waiting for a board to return your calls. A vacant strip mall in Frisco that could produce 82 units under the old rules can now produce 156.
That’s ending the bureaucrat tax. That’s real.
And Texas isn’t alone. Florida’s Live Local Act overrode local zoning statewide — Miami alone has 20,000 apartments in the pipeline as a result. Montana passed the country’s most sweeping red-state zoning overhaul in 2023 and just won at its own Supreme Court. Tennessee and Kentucky have moved too.
The playbook exists. It works. Red states are running it.
Whoever Solves Housing, Wins
Here’s the political reality.
Since the pandemic, Americans have ranked cost of living as their single top concern. Above immigration. Above foreign policy. Every region. Every demographic.
Whoever solves housing wins. Full stop.
And the conservative movement is uniquely built for this fight. Because the villain isn’t capitalism. It isn’t builders. It isn’t families. It isn’t even your landlord, not really.
It’s a hundred-year-old bureaucratic priesthood that decided your land isn’t really yours — and an American tradition of property rights that says otherwise.
President Trump’s economists just put the price tag on it. $100,000 per home. Thirteen million homes locked up. An entire generation told the American Dream isn’t for them.
That’s the MADA agenda. Make the American Dream Again.
An America where you work hard, follow the rules, and afford a place to build a life — that was always here. It just needed a President willing to say it plainly, and a conservative movement willing to take on the planning class that’s been blocking it.
The American Dream isn’t dead.
It’s being blocked by the bureaucrat tax.
And we can unblock it.
