The Deep State Is Past Its Shelf Life

September 9, 2024 by J.B. Shurk

At the Economic Club of New York, President Trump announced: “I will create a Government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government — and making recommendations for drastic reforms.”  Elon Musk is eager to get involved with the project.  In one fell swoop, every other reason for re-electing Donald Trump took a back seat to the tantalizing possibility of turning his second term into an Office Space sequel.  

No government since the Byzantine Empire has been in more desperate need of immediate downsizing.  Can you picture the billionaire boys putting on their “efficiency expert” hats and shearing the bloated federal workforce one incompetent functionary at a time?  Commissioner Musk: “So what is it that you would say you do here?”  Crickets.  President Trump: “You’re fired.  Bring in the next one.”  If that’s all those two did for four straight years, round two of Trumpalooza would be a colossal success.  

Most of the federal blob is dead weight.  Its chief purpose is to hook so many families on a federal paycheck that tens of millions of Americans will never stop voting for its continuing expansion.  Even worse, it’s a Janus-faced monstrosity with internally conflicting mission objectives.  We’ve got departments dedicated to fomenting wars abroad and departments dedicated to stopping them.  We’ve got agencies tasked with confiscating taxpayers’ income and agencies tasked with providing economic relief.  Committees are organized to study “problems,” but those problems can’t be officially solved because doing so would mean that committee-members are out of jobs.  That possibility becomes the only “problem” that needless federal workers decide to solve, and they “solve” it by doing absolutely nothing.  The end result is that an unknowable number of ghost programs dedicated to issues that arose decades ago are still bouncing around the bureaucratic ether for no other reason than to keep the federal blob paid and happy.  There’s probably some group out there still ostensibly studying whether the popularity of compact cassette tapes will adversely affect the 8-track cartridge industry — and still probably another group filing seasonal reports on the likelihood that 8-track will end demand for cassette tapes!  It’s madness.

The whole mess reminds me of an underrated cinematic gem from the ‘80s called Pascali’s Island.  In that pre-WWI period piece, Sir Ben Kingsley plays a spy for the Ottoman Empire on a small Greek island filled with foreign emissaries from other crumbling empires.  For decades, Kingsley’s Pascali has written copious reports for the Sultan detailing all of the suspicious activities taking place in the area.  Although he is paid regularly for his services, he has never once received a reply.  He concludes that he was long ago lost in the bureaucratic system and that his life of espionage for a dying empire has been meaningless.  How many Pascalis currently work for the U.S. government?  How many mandarins file meaningless reports that never get read and receive regular payments from some holdover account established by a long-forgotten appropriation bill from another era?  Do all empires commit suicide by drowning in a sea of their own red tape?

Even worse than all the federal driftwood, of course, are all the federal apparatchiks who actually take their sinecures seriously!  Better to have a million Pascalis being paid for nothing than a single Jack Smith who thinks he’s entitled to incarcerate the Republican nominee for president while hiding the ongoing crimes of the imperial Deep State!  Anyone who needs a lesson in the corrupting influences of power need only interact with someone from the Internal Revenue Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Transportation Security Administration, or any other bureaucratic busybody interested only in taxing you, regulating your behavior, or patting you down before you board a plane.  Unless you bend over when ordered and promptly cough up everything you’re told you owe, some other faceless-but-all-powerful bureaucrat throws your name on a list.  You definitely don’t want to be put on any mysterious list!  The regime enforcers at the Fascist Bureau of Intimidation just love to wake up people on lists in the dead of night.  And they don’t knock.  

That so-called civil servants could possess so many obscene regulatory tools to terrorize the American people is an affront to the principles that breathed life into our country.  The Founding Fathers rebelled against the British Empire because they were taxed roughly 1% of their incomes without proper representation in Parliament.  Can you imagine how they would respond to a punitive Leviathan that confiscated 50% of their wealth through a smorgasbord of taxes and regulations?  Or what they would say to a snooping trespasser who tried to tell them what they could and could not do with the watering holes on their family farms?  Or how they might react to a stranger who felt up their wives and daughters in the name of “security”?  Whoah, Nelly!  The men who declared independence from government tyranny and fought a costly war for personal liberty would burn the Deep State to the ground and drive its ashes right into the sea!

The rise of the vast administrative state over the last century has been an absolute body blow for the U.S. Constitution and the American conception of limited government.  Every couple years, political parties rile up voters, and everyone heads to the polls.  From that frenzy, we send a few hundred people to D.C. to putatively represent our interests.  At the same time, three million civilian employees actually do the day-to-day work of the federal government.  This number doesn’t include military personnel, contractors, part-time workers, or the roughly twenty million other Americans who work for state and local governments across the United States.  For every elected official who is sent to the nation’s capital to do the people’s bidding, there are six thousand federal employees who never face the voters.  

Where do their allegiances lie?  Well, if the 2020 election totals in D.C. reflect the ideological bent of the administrative state, over 90% of the bureaucratic blob votes Democrat.  If it seems as if Republican presidents and members of Congress are constantly swimming upstream to accomplish any of their policy goals, that’s because they are.  Control of Congress and the White House might shift back and forth between the major parties, but those actually doing the governing march in lockstep with the Democrat Party.  We don’t have democratic institutions or representative government in America.  We have one-party control!  The mandarins running the federal government are indistinguishable from the mandarins running the Chinese Communist Party.  No wonder Tiananmen Tim is the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee.

What are the practical consequences of a one-party State?  We get a taxpayer-funded PBS whose coverage of the Republican convention is 72% negative, while its coverage of the Democrat convention is 88% positive.  We get a presidential candidate in Commie-la Harris who openly endorses government regulation of public debate and promises to use the Department of (in)Justice as a weapon to censor online speech she does not like.  We get a Democrat Party that wants to use the force of law to segregate white and black Americans and provide them disparate levels of government support.  We get brainwashed Marxists in judges’ robes rewriting statutory law and interfering with private commerce while prattling about “environmental justice” and other “woke” nonsense.  We get trillions of dollars in Green New Deal spending that exacerbate inflation while failing to accomplish any environmental goals.  We get an immoral and criminal Deep State that persecutes J6 prisoners for their political beliefs while fighting for the rights of abusive pedophiles.  

To save the Republic, President Trump and Commissioner Musk, hand the Deep State some Kleenex...and fire them all.