There is a unique kind of beauty to the Great Salt Lake. If you’ve ever watched a sunset from Antelope Island, reflecting off that glassy water, you know it’s one of the most striking landscapes on earth. It’s part of our identity.
But the lake provides more than a view; it offers a physics lesson we seem to have forgotten in civics class: The plumbing matters more than the politics.
Look at the valley’s plumbing. We have two major lakes fed by the same snowpack. To the south, Utah Lake is fresh. To the north, the Great Salt Lake is several times saltier than the ocean. The difference isn’t the source; it’s the outlet.
Utah Lake has a drain — the Jordan River. It stays fresh because it flushes. The Great Salt Lake, however, is a “terminal basin.” It takes everything you give it and refuses to give anything back. Water leaves only by evaporation, but the minerals stay behind. Year after year, the residue concentrates.
If you want to understand why the federal government feels so sluggish today, don’t look at the politicians. Look at the water. Washington, D.C., is the ultimate terminal basin.
Like the Bear River, government programs usually start as “fresh water” — law or agencies created with good intentions to solve real problems. But in a closed basin (no outlet), even fresh water turns to brine.
In the private sector, the “Jordan River” is bankruptcy. If a company stops serving people, the ecosystem flushes itself. Government has no natural mechanism for dissolution. A law passed in 1974 stays on the books forever, buried under 50 years of silt. Government can end things, but it is high-friction work involving rare alignment and political risk. So, most things don’t leave. They sediment.
The accumulation doesn’t look like villainy; it looks like paperwork. The hot air of campaign season evaporates, but the regulations stay behind. You can see the salinity reading in the Federal Register, which ran past 107,000 pages in 2024.
Eventually, the concentration reaches a point where the environment changes. Complex life struggles in high salinity, but simple organisms thrive in the muck.
In the lake, that’s brine shrimp. In D.C., it’s the complexity industry. Consultants, compliance officers and specialist firms have adapted to the toxicity. When survival depends on knowing the maze, the maze becomes a moat. To these cottage industries, structural outlets like term limits and sunset clauses aren’t solutions; they are predators. They defend the salt because the salt pays.
Meanwhile, innovators and small-business owners find themselves fighting osmotic pressure, spending more energy navigating bureaucracy than doing actual work.
We cannot afford a terminal basin in D.C., and since the government lacks a natural outlet, we have to engineer one.
Real solutions look less like partisan bickering and more like mechanical engineering. That begins with term limits, ensuring that leadership cycles out before it calcifies into a permanent ruling class. We need strict sunset clauses on new spending. If a program is still necessary in 10 years, force Congress to vote on it again. If not, let it flow down the river. We need “one in, two out” budgeting for regulatory volume. And crucially, we need to define what “done” looks like for agencies. When the mission is accomplished, the team shouldn’t make new work; they should get a parade and a dismissal.
Utah is proud to be the best-managed state in the nation. But even the best management cannot cheat physics. The Great Salt Lake is a treasure, but it is also a warning sitting in our backyard: Systems without outlets don’t just stagnate — they concentrate.
We can admire the view without emulating the chemistry. We must ensure that our government remains an environment where something other than the bottom feeders can survive.