The task of every dedicated employee is to carefully consider the goals of the company, evaluate obstacles to their achievement, and formulate detailed plans to overcome those difficulties. However, when you are up to your ass in alligators, it is sometimes difficult to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp. – Sign on the wall of one of the author’s prior employers
Donald Trump promised us that he’d drain the Swamp. As a real estate developer, you’d think that he understood how that should be done. The State Department is known as “Foggy Bottom” because it is in what was originally a fetid swamp. Land had to be reclaimed by filling to “drain” that swamp. Disney World near Orlando is built on swamp land, as any golfer will discover after a rainstorm. Much of that land became usable after swamps were filled in. And the beat goes on.
The bureaucratic mire in DC is full of predatory beasts, noxious insects, and other unseen hazards. Directives from the White House are apt to be ignored, since there is no one translating those directives into marching orders for the lower floors of government owned buildings. This leaves the denizens of departments to their own devices, none of which are the slightest bit concerned with anything beyond the office water cooler.
Thus, if the concerns of the cubicle align with the editorial page of the Washington Compost, then all is well, and the office sports pool becomes the most urgent part of the day.
If the Secretary of Department X decides to go full MAGA, little or nothing will actually happen, since most of his underlings frankly don’t give a damn. They are protected by Civil Service rules, and can’t be fired short of the next millennium. In other words, it’s hopeless.
Yes, I know, Donald Trump claims to know what he did wrong and will do things differently next time. It all sounds good, but so do all the claims from every politician. After all, they’re “fighting for you!” But actually, they’re mostly trying to baffle you with b*&#$@%t so you’ll vote for them again. And since government employees contribute to campaigns that will keep them and their BFFs employed, don’t count on anything good happening.
If you can’t get rid of all the feral animals inside a bureaucracy, what can you do? Ask Donald Trump how he dealt with swamp land on his golf courses or building sites! You don’t drain the swamp. You get rid of it! That’s right, you fill it in so it’s not a swamp anymore. And just in case this picture isn’t clear enough, watch the TV series “Swamp People.” The water in the swamp goes up and down, but even when it’s down, it’s still a swamp. With the next rain, it’s full again. And it doesn’t matter how many alligators you pull out of the swamp. There are hundreds new for each one harvested.
The only way to drain a swamp is to fill it in. Let that sink in.
When the swamp is made up of government bureaucracies, how do you fill it in? Believe it or not, there’s actually a way to make that happen. It’s just not something someone inside the Beltway is likely to dream up. But with enough allies in Congress, something good can happen. Just imagine if they looked at each Cabinet department by itself.
A couple of departments are absolutely necessary. We have to have Defense. Without it, all we can do is sing Kumbaya when Vlad decides to point his guns at us. We have to have State, since it handles all the Ambassadors and so on. They also lead in negotiating our deals with other countries. So we can’t get rid of them, although we can retire about two thirds of their people, leaving only the ones who actually get something done. Ditto for Justice, although the discussion of how to straighten them out gets perilously near the gallows.
With those easy decisions behind us, let’s tackle some easy ones on the other side. Education serves no useful purpose at the Federal level. Health and Human Services has to administer Medicare and Medicaid until we’re able to get rid of them, but the National Institutes of Health? Let’s look closer.
NIH exists to promote NIH, not health
NIH has a budget larger than a number of states, and has twenty-odd subdivisions, including CDC and NIAID. CDC has lied to us consistently about COVID, instigated by the director of NIAID, Saint “I am Science” Fauci. They get away with this because they hand out about half of the medical research dollars in the US. Those dollars go to people and programs that the grant office likes.
Translating that into plain English, if you agree with the NIH orthodoxy, you’ll get grant money. Then your paper will be sent to a journal where it is peer reviewed by other people who get grants because they agree with the NIH orthodoxy. If your paper shows something they don’t like, it doesn’t get published. At the same time, your grant money will dry up and go to someone more compliant.
You get the picture. Go along to get along and you’ll get rich. Anything else will get you condemned as a “fringe” epidemiologist, even if you’ve got a Nobel Prize like Michael Levitt. NIH exists to promote NIH, not health. While it may be constitutionally OK under the general welfare clause, NIH is a cancer. And it points the way to actually draining the swamp.
The first task for Republican leadership is to pass “spaghetti appropriations.” That’s right, string them out rather than dumping them all into an omnibus bill. Fund DOJ in its own bill, and send that to the Big Guy’s desk. Dare him to veto it. Ditto for State and the military. Don’t allow anything for any other department to creep into each of the bills.
Now fund Medicare and Medicaid. But don’t fund NIH. Dare the Occupant to veto it. And tell the public that you’re protecting their financial survival while working on measures to correct the NIH corruption that led to COVID and the COVID management debacle. Throw in whatever other branches of NIH that have problems into the explanation. Then put the whole shooting match in the back of the line. Even put Education ahead of NIH.
Imagine the screaming by Fauci et al that America’s health is in danger. When that happens, point out how many people died because of the lockdowns. How many healthy athletes are pushing up daisies because the shot killed their hearts? As Goose says in Top Gun, those lists are long and distinguished. The public will realize that the government hacks don’t care about them.
Continue the process, but simply forget to pass appropriations for departments that don’t need to exist, like Homeland Security. Put any necessary border functions back in the DOJ where they need to be, and get another bureaucracy off our backs. When all the needful functions are funded, then we can have real arguments about the rest. When those departments shut down, no “essential” government functions will be affected. And the rest of us will be better off.
Ted Noel MD is a retired Anesthesiologist/Intensivist who podcasts and posts on social media as DoctorTed and @vidzette. His DoctorTed podcasts are available on many podcast channels.
Image by NIAID via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
