Dragonslayers by Larry Schweikart

Author:Larry Schweikart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2022-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Ronald Reagan and the Bureaucracy Swamp

T he connections between Ronald Reagan’s battles with his swamp and JFK’s struggle with the CIA Swamp are strong, but Reagan and Donald Trump really were fighting the same war extended across a 40-year span. In many ways, Reagan was also dealing with the unfinished Swamp battle of Grover Cleveland (the Spoils Swamp) but with one significant difference: the parties had ceased to be the major regulating mechanism on the bureaucracy as they had been in Cleveland’s time. Instead, insiders in each party had formed what would often be called the “Uniparty” that cooperated in graft rather than competing to oust their opponents. By 1981, when the Gipper entered office, he faced a vastly transformed administrative state that had attained a life of its own. It grew so bad that Reagan once quipped that the closest thing he had ever seen to eternal life on earth was a government agency.

A new dynamic had accompanied this profound shift. Not only were the bureaus, agencies, and offices immune to political pressure from their own parties, but they were also beyond the control of either Congress or the president. This new unconstitutional counterstate had gotten a toehold in the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, then entrenched itself in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Briefly, as John Marini notes in Unmasking the Administrative State, Congress sought a regulatory role by using the budget in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before it capitulated.387 Courts became the last resort for reining in the runaway bureaucracy, but more often than not, rather than striking at the constitutionality of the agency itself (or its mission), the courts have by and large merely confirmed their right to exist and then attempted to define the parameters in which they operate.

Short of a court telling a particular agency it has gone too far, the bureaucracy “has established the purpose, unity, and the rational authority of the political branches…. [and has] sought to progressively replace politics by substituting administrative rulemaking for general lawmaking.”388 It has become its own political faction whose “platform” is administrative rule. In that process, it deliberately eroded or destroyed any institutions in civil society that provided a foundation for self-government, including private organizations, churches, and the family. The actual practice of the political branches of American government found themselves bound to accommodating various interest groups and lobbies that have carved out niches in the administrative state. Of course, throughout this evolution, partisans were pushed to the side in favor of trained “experts.” Nothing showed that more clearly than the response to the Covid-19 “China virus” in 2020 when the Center for Disease Control, and its power mad director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, became a health dictator for national Covid policy.

As Reagan would find out, it was in the area of budgets that Progressives first achieved a major victory. Congress historically had controlled the budget, but Progressives argued for a president to formulate a

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