The First 100 Days of a Ted Brown Presidency: What the Record Suggests

Photo: Farragutful, via Wikimedia Commons

01 The record and the scenario

Ted Brown is the Libertarian Party's candidate for U.S. Senate from Texas in 2026, campaigning on a platform of Less Government, Individual Liberty, and Peace & Non-Intervention. His campaign site frames his candidacy as “a principled alternative to politics as usual”: “Libertarians believe that you have the right to live your life as you see fit — as long as you take responsibility for your actions and don't violate the rights of other people.” The through-line of his campaign is repeal: “There are too many laws. I am not running for U.S. Senator to be a ‘lawmaker.' I am running to repeal as many laws as I can.”

His indictment of the regulatory state is quantitative as well as philosophical: by his campaign's count there are “137,000 armed federal agents from 83 different agencies” prepared to enforce the federal code, and in Texas alone “over 78,000 licensed ‘peace officers' working for over 2,700 police agencies.” The campaign cites the familiar claim that Americans “commit three felonies a day without even knowing it,” and argues that thousands of pages of federal law “turn non-violent personal behavior into crimes, or which create countless bureaucratic administrative offenses” — while murder, rape, robbery and fraud “should be illegal” and stay so.

An honest reading requires one careful distinction. Much of the Brown site's material is Libertarian party history rather than personal record: the 1982 repeal of Alaska's state income tax by Libertarian legislators, the coining of “privatization,” fifty years of opposition to the War on Drugs, advocacy of marriage equality in the 1970s, and opposition to unnecessary wars. These are accomplishments of the party whose banner he carries, cited by his campaign — they are not offices held or bills passed by Ted Brown, and this analysis does not treat them as his personal record. The public record of his own positions is his published platform: digital privacy, taxes, and immigration, plus the three stated pillars.

This article does not predict that Ted Brown will become president. It examines how the individual's documented positions and record could translate into executive priorities if placed in presidential office.

Analysis — not prediction. N43 and Hermes AI grounds every scenario in the documented record as of September 21, 2026; where evidence is incomplete we say so.

02 Day One: what a president could do alone

The first structural fact about a hypothetical Brown presidency is that his platform's three pillars are mostly verbs aimed at Congress: repeal, abolish, end. What a president controls on Day One is directives, personnel, clemency and enforcement priorities. The Brown record maps onto that toolkit unevenly — heavily on surveillance and clemency, lightly everywhere else.

Likely Day-One Actions (unilateral)

• Fourth Amendment surveillance directives. His platform states: “I am committed to ending government's practice of spying on everyone,” with protection from unreasonable search and seizure extended to “records held by third parties” and individual rights “to know what personal data government collects about them, to withhold consent for its collection, and to demand its deletion.” A presidential translation: an executive order imposing warrant requirements on federal access to third-party data, a mandatory inventory of federal collection programs, and retention and deletion rules inside every agency.
• Camera-surveillance limits. He opposes “Flock or other CCTV cameras being installed all over public places to monitor our movements.” A president can order federal agencies out of warrantless plate-reader data sharing and attach conditions to the grant programs that fund state and local networks.
• Clemency and enforcement deprioritization. The overcriminalization critique — non-violent personal behavior turned into crimes — implies a clemency initiative for non-violent federal offenders and DOJ guidance deprioritizing administrative and victimless offenses. The specific populations are inference from his stated philosophy and are flagged as such, not as published policy.
• Troop redeployment orders. “Bring all troops home and end America's role as the world's policeman” is a stated pillar. As commander-in-chief a president can order drawdowns; sustaining them against basing and procurement law requires Congress, which is where the item stops being unilateral.

Actions the Candidate Could Not Do Alone

• Repeal the income tax and abolish the IRS — his signature proposal — is revenue law, written by the House and Senate. No executive order repeals a tax.
• Abolish ICE and overhaul immigration law — an agency created by statute can only be dissolved by statute.
• Repeal the vehicle “kill switch” requirement he opposes (a 2027 mandate on automakers) — the mandate is legislative; a president may direct implementation posture but cannot strike it.
• Mass repeal of federal criminal law — the core campaign promise (“repeal as many laws as I can”) is a legislative program by definition; a senator proposes repeal, and so would a president, but Congress disposes.
• Ending domestic highway checkpoints and the 100-mile border zone — CBP's inland authority is statutory and regulatory; changing it durably needs Congress or rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act, not a Day One order alone.

03 Days 2-30: reorienting the executive branch

Where does the Brown philosophy reach inside the agencies? Only where the platform has something to say — and it has a lot to say about enforcement organizations.

• Department of Justice. The overcriminalization program would start here: clemency review, enforcement-priority memos, and a campaign-shaped audit of how many of the “83 different agencies” with armed personnel actually enforce criminal law. His site's framing — that officials “don't care whether their plans work or not — as long as they have ‘good intentions'” — implies an aggressive review posture toward regulatory enforcement units.
• DHS, ICE and CBP. The platform is scathing: ICE is described as “so out-of-control that it can't be reformed” and “should be abolished, the sooner the better,” with CBP to be “limited to the border and other points of entry” rather than operating inland “as far as 100 miles as currently authorized.” Abolition is legislative, but a Brown administration could unilaterally direct interior enforcement standdowns, end workplace raid policies and family-separation practices, and shrink checkpoint operations — subject to statute, appropriations and litigation.
• Intelligence community and surveillance agencies. “Ending government's practice of spying on everyone” would be a directive program: collection inventories, third-party-data warrant requirements, deletion rights, and opposition to any “digital identification” integration of “personal ID, medical records, banking records, biometric data” for government use.
• Treasury and the IRS. He wants the IRS abolished — Congress's job. The interim executive move is enforcement-priority guidance within existing law while repeal is pursued legislatively.
• Department of Defense. The non-intervention pillar implies redeployment planning and a drawdown of the forward-deployed posture — with the standing caveat that basing, troop levels and procurement are appropriations matters.

His stated personnel philosophy is not documented — the campaign says nothing public about how he would choose appointees or manage a transition, and N43 will not invent one. There is not enough public evidence to determine Brown's position on the Departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Labor or Transportation; the platform names agencies only as objects of the general “hundreds of federal agencies and programs” repeal ambition, and that general statement is not a per-agency program.

04 Days 30-60: the first legislative package

The Brown legislative program is unusually legible for a minor-party candidate, because he has published three platform areas in full. Translated into a bill stack:

High evidence

• An income-tax repeal act. The published plan is explicit: “Repeal the income tax, abolish the IRS, and replace them with nothing,” coupled with “massive spending cuts” in “a single package that includes the largest tax cut in American history.” The campaign's arithmetic: $2.6 trillion of federal income tax extracted in FY 2022; 100.6 million income-tax payers; a claimed $25,844 average per-taxpayer savings. He explicitly rejects flat-tax and national-sales-tax replacements — even without the personal income tax, he argues, the federal government “would still collect the same total amount that they did 12 years ago.” He extends the same logic to the estate tax, capital gains tax and Social Security tax, on the constitutional claim that the federal role is limited “such as national defense, the post office and patents and copyrights.”
• An immigration liberalization act. The published “Ellis Island-style solution”: abolish ICE; “no more checkpoints, raids, or family separations”; “free movement of people across international borders”; admission “after checking for criminal record and diseases”; entry “at any international port, not just border towns”; and “work from Day One instead of welfare programs.” CBP would be confined to ports of entry.
• A digital privacy act. Statutory versions of the platform's privacy planks: no government-mandated age verification or social-media age limits (“It's the responsibility of parents, not the government”), no digital ID, no social-credit systems, no internet censorship and no limits on VPNs — with third-party records brought under Fourth Amendment protection and data knowledge, consent and deletion rights federalized.

Moderate evidence

• A federal criminal-law repeal package. “Repeal as many laws as I can” plus the non-violent-behavior framing implies a decriminalization and deregulation bill, but the platform names no specific statutes — the direction is documented, the itemization is not.
• A spending-cut and debt package. The site's debt narrative — the debt “doubled under President George W. Bush, doubled again under President Barack Obama, rose by $7 trillion under President Donald Trump 45, and rose $8 trillion more under President Joe Biden,” now “approaching $39 trillion — $114,000 for every man, woman and child” — implies a balanced-budget-or-better proposal, though only “massive spending cuts” is specified.

Low evidence: no items are inferred beyond this. The Libertarian Party's national platform should not automatically be read as Brown's personal position on areas his campaign does not address, and no such items are manufactured here.

05 Days 60-100: where governing meets reality

Day 60 is where the Brown program meets arithmetic. Repealing the income tax “and replacing it with nothing” removes roughly $2.6 trillion of annual federal revenue — the overwhelming majority of individual income-tax receipts — while the campaign simultaneously proposes to shrink the federal government to “national defense, the post office and patents and copyrights.” That is not a tax bill; it is a demand that Congress unwind roughly three-quarters of the federal budget. His own site concedes the political physics: “it's next to impossible to end a government program, since each program has beneficiaries and supporters who will fight to keep their place at the public trough.” A president can send the bill; getting 218 House votes and 60 Senate votes for repealing the revenue base of Social Security-adjacent spending is a different question, and the filibuster makes the Senate the harder wall.

Abolishing ICE runs into the same structure from the other side: the agency exists because Congress built it, and the immigration “police state” the campaign describes — checkpoints, the 100-mile border zone, expedited removal — is mostly statutory. Even under unified government, no recent Congress has moved a bill resembling the Ellis Island plan's “free movement of people across international borders”; a Brown administration would be asking for the largest immigration liberalization in a century from a Congress that has not passed a major immigration bill in decades.

The courts and administrative law add their own timelines. Extending Fourth Amendment protection to third-party records is a constitutional position the Supreme Court has only partially embraced (Carpenter v. United States moved toward it for cell-site data); a statutory version is durable, an executive-order version is only as durable as the next administration. Rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act takes years, notice-and-comment cycles and litigation. And the federalism irony is sharp: a president who wants Washington out of domestic checkpoints would find that the checkpoint authority he targets was written by the same Congress whose cooperation he would need to remove it.

What is genuinely fast: the surveillance directives binding federal agencies, clemency, enforcement-prioritization memos, and the first redeployment orders. What is years-long or never: the tax repeal, the IRS's abolition, ICE's abolition, the immigration overhaul, and any mass repeal of criminal law. A Brown first 100 days would be an executive-branch privacy and clemency sprint wrapped around a repeal program that only Congress can enact — which is precisely how he frames the job: “I am not running to be a ‘lawmaker.'”

06 The policy record in detail

Taxes and Fiscal Policy

The most fully developed plank. Taxes are “always too high, at the federal, state, and local levels” — “Half of what we earn goes to taxes” — and “I will never vote to raise taxes.” The income tax is “the biggest government intrusion into the lives of the American people,” forcing “every worker to be a bookkeeper” and wasting “hundreds of billions of dollars” in compliance. The plan: repeal, abolish the IRS, replace with nothing; no flat tax or national sales tax; extend to estate, capital gains and Social Security taxes; pair with “massive spending cuts” against a debt the campaign tracks administration by administration to “$39 trillion.”

Digital Privacy and Surveillance

Equally developed, and his most executive-branch-ready material: opposition to government ID requirements for internet and device use, age-verification mandates, digital ID and social-credit systems, internet censorship and VPN restrictions; Fourth Amendment protection extended to third-party records; data knowledge, consent and deletion rights; and opposition to the 2027 vehicle “kill switch” requirement and to “Flock or other CCTV cameras” across public places. “It may seem quaint and old-fashioned,” he writes, but “we all still have the right to privacy and anonymity and shouldn't be bothered or harassed by authorities if we are minding our own business.”

Immigration

The Ellis Island plan, as detailed above. The campaign's moral frame: “Immigrants (both ‘legal' and ‘illegal') commit far fewer crimes than native-born Americans. They contribute to our economy, not detract from it.” His family history is woven in — a great-grandfather who fled anti-Semitism in Czarist Russia in 1890, another who fled forced military service in Germany in 1904 — and the site describes recent enforcement, citing Minneapolis, in the language of a “police state.”

Criminal Justice and Overcriminalization

The direction is unambiguous — repeal-oriented, non-violent-offense focused, “basic laws that we all know to follow” kept — but no specific federal sentencing or clemency program is published. The armed-agent statistics are the evidence; the bill list is not.

Foreign Policy and Defense

The third pillar — “Bring all troops home and end America's role as the world's policeman” — is stated but not developed into a defense budget, alliance or basing program. No position on specific conflicts, defense spending levels, or aid programs is published beyond the general non-intervention commitment.

There is not enough public evidence to determine Brown's position on healthcare, education, energy or environmental policy, or on technology and AI issues beyond privacy. The party-history material his site cites — five decades of drug-war opposition, marriage-equality advocacy in the 1970s, the Alaska income-tax repeal — is the Libertarian Party's record, not his, and this analysis does not convert it into personal positions.

07 What could not happen alone — and what could

What President Brown Could Not Do Alone

• Repeal the federal income tax or abolish the IRS — revenue law belongs to Congress.
• Abolish ICE or confine CBP to ports of entry — the agencies and their inland authority are statutory.
• Enact the Ellis Island immigration system — free movement, screening rules and work authorization are legislation.
• Repeal the 2027 vehicle kill-switch mandate — a congressional act.
• Repeal federal criminal statutes wholesale — Congress writes the criminal code.
• Cut spending or balance the budget — appropriations are Congress's Article I power.
• Bring every troop home permanently — redeployment orders start a drawdown; basing structure, end-strength and the defense budget are appropriations.
• End state and local camera networks by decree — anti-commandeering doctrine limits a president to federal-agency rules and grant conditions.

What Could Change Within 100 Days

• Warrant requirements for federal access to third-party data, plus collection inventories and deletion rights inside agencies.
• Federal-agency withdrawal from warrantless plate-reader (Flock) data sharing, with grant conditions on local networks.
• A clemency initiative for non-violent offenders, consistent with the overcriminalization platform.
• DOJ enforcement-priority memos deprioritizing administrative and victimless offenses.
• Initial troop-redeployment orders implementing the bring-them-home pillar, within funding law.

Potential Coalition Partners

The surveillance agenda has genuine cross-party energy — the same Flock-camera and data-privacy ground where other 2026 Libertarian candidates campaign, civil-liberties Democrats and privacy-minded Republicans meet. Anti-intervention brings together the antiwar left and the restraint right. Tax repeal finds free-market conservatives, though most of them want a replacement tax, which Brown explicitly rejects. Immigration liberalization pairs with pro-immigration liberals on economics and with some religious conservatives on humanitarian grounds.

Areas of Likely Conflict

Practically everyone on the revenue question: voting to repeal the income tax with “nothing” in its place is a vote to unwind most of the federal budget, and no congressional majority of either party has shown any appetite for it. The immigration police-state critique puts him against the enforcement right and much of the moderate middle. Law-enforcement organizations would oppose both the surveillance limits and the enforcement deprioritization. And his own party's history cuts both ways: he is running on fifty years of Libertarian positions, which makes him ideologically legible but legislatively isolated — the same positions have kept the party out of federal power for those five decades.

08 The 100-day scorecard and what the record tells us

The scorecard grades the documented record, and Brown's is a platform record: three fully published issue areas — taxes, privacy, immigration — plus a repeal philosophy and a non-intervention pillar. What distinguishes the record is not its breadth but its completeness where it exists: on those three areas, the positions are specific enough to cost out, litigate and legislate, which is more than most minor-party candidacies produce.

The structural irony is the same one that shadows every Libertarian scenario: the best-documented positions are the least available to a president alone. Repeal of the income tax, abolition of the IRS and of ICE, and the Ellis Island immigration system are all acts of Congress — and Congress has not moved on any of them in modern memory. What a Brown administration could actually do in 100 days is the privacy-and-clemency agenda: warrant requirements, collection inventories, plate-reader withdrawal, enforcement-priority memos — durable only in part, since executive orders bind only until the next president.

What moves fast is what sits inside the executive branch. What is years-long or never is everything requiring 218 and 60 votes — which, under his own framing, is the point: he describes the job as repeal, and repeal is a legislative verb. A Brown presidency would be a permanent structural argument with Congress, punctuated by the unilateral privacy actions his platform maps cleanly onto existing executive power.

Where the record is thin, this analysis says so: no published positions on healthcare, education, energy, environment or defense budgeting; no public-service record in the materials reviewed; and a campaign site that leans on Libertarian Party history where a personal record would go. The party's positions are not automatically his — though in the three platform areas, he has explicitly made them his own.

How he differs from both major parties: Democrats and Republicans in 2026 argue about tax rates, enforcement levels and intervention scope — Brown argues against the existence of the income tax, the interior enforcement apparatus, and the world-policeman role itself. That is not a policy disagreement within the current frame; it is a disagreement with the frame.

The honest conclusion of the record: the first 100 days of a Brown presidency would be an executive-branch privacy restoration plus a clemency program, wrapped around a repeal-and-abolish legislative package that defines the presidency's agenda while remaining almost entirely outside its unilateral power — with the rest of the traditional federal agenda undetermined by anything he has published.