Perhaps the only reason there has not been more political pressure to privatize the U.S. military is because the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower dubbed it, already profits handsomely from funds Congress allocates each year. So do states where military bases and defense industries create jobs. The knock-on effects support communities and local businesses. If it were not so , we would hear more from the investor class about the Pentagon’s under-performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, about its “bloated” budgets, and about “lavish” benefits bestowed upon entrenched, under-skilled “government” employees dependent on public largesse. Leaner, private-sector competitors could do the job faster and cheaper through innovation, competition, and increased efficiency.
In other areas where the government spends money, that has been a dominant narrative over the last half century. Pressure to operate government like a business has yielded congressional actions designed to hollow out government to the point where only for-profit enterprises are left to perform its historical functions. (See: US Postal Service.) All that has brought us to where we are now in this lethal pandemic: a pack of grifters with a withered sense of the public interest controls the executive branch. They are themselves less skilled than the dedicated officials who chose public service over maximizing their personal bottom lines. The results are measured in tens of thousands of American dead.
This hollowing out has gone on for years, Dan Balz explains in the Washington Post. It has grown dramatically worse in the last three:
Trump was elected having never served in government or the military. That was one reason he appealed to many of those who backed him. He came to Washington deeply suspicious of what he branded the “deep state.” Promising to drain the swamp, he has vilified career civil servants and the institutions of government now called upon to perform at the highest levels.
His transition was messy and since then his administration has been slow to populate the thousands of political slots atop federal agencies, and the president has seemed to prefer acting agency heads to those who can win confirmation from the Senate and the authority that imprimatur conveys. He has targeted career officials and sought retribution for those who differed with him, particularly those whose job it is to find and expose problems.
“One thing to keep in mind is that government takes on hard problems,” said David E. Lewis, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. “They’re often problems that can’t be solved by the market and there aren’t private entities to solve them.”
Prior to the election of President Ronald Reagan, says Marc Hetherington, a professor at the University of North Carolina, anti-government rhetoric focused on what functions government ought and ought not perform.
“What changed with Reagan and the decades since,” Hetherington believes, “is that the conversation moves away from what government ought to do to government is incompetent to do things.” Those who believed that set about making it true. Taxation is theft, goes the libertarian argument. “Starve the beast” was born, leading to a “government on the cheap,” and “penny-wise, pound-foolish idea of how we manage government agencies,” Lewis said. Now that it is needed, things are in too much disrepair to deliver.
Furthermore, Trump brought to the White House his habit of surrounding himself with incompetents, ideologues, and brown-nosing sycophants. Among his family members, cabinet, and appointees are all three, often in one body.
Thus, New York Times science and health reporter Donald McNeil Jr. called this week on US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield to resign over mismanagement of the pandemic.
“We completely blew it for the first two months of our response,” McNeil told CNN. “We were in a ‘headless chicken’ phase.” The fault is not China’s, but the president’s.
The result is the flailing federal response to the coronavirus pandemic that Balz describes:
“I think this event is revealing of what governance wonks have been warning about for a long time, namely that we haven’t been very focused on the basic governing systems we need to execute policy successfully,” said William Galston of the Brookings Institution. “The competency of government to serve as an instrument of policy delivery has been weakened substantially. One of our long-term tasks is to rebuild that capacity.”
First, voters will have to relearn that government is designed to operate as a public service, not as a for-profit enterprise.
Former President Barack Obama addressed that issue in his virtual commencement address Saturday to graduates of historically black colleges and universities. (HBCUs).
“[O]ur society and democracy only works when we think not just about ourselves, but about each other,” he said. “More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”
Balz concludes:
There is much that works well in the federal government, particularly everyday activities that citizens take for granted. Career civil servants on the whole are dedicated and skilled. But when the challenges shift from ordinary to extraordinary, cracks within the system are exposed, demands on leadership rise and the government’s competence is rightly called into question. This has been such a time.
But both the crisis of confidence and government incompetence have come not by the nature of government itself by decades of efforts to rot it out from within. The rot is fed not only by the greed of those intent on selling off the country’s assets for parts, but by their designs on aggregating power to themselves in betrayal of democratic principles in which they never believed.
The British call members of their legislature MPs (Member of Parliament). A Member of Congress (MOC), Wikipedia advises, is “a person who has been appointed or elected and inducted into an official body called a congress.” For some in ours, perhaps the appellation ROT is more appropriate, like the ‘O’ in Roger Thornhill’s monogram. It stands for nothing.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.