They’re Scared
The administrative state is in an unusually tractable mood.
The wild man is back. Donald Trump is in the White House, and, if you believe half of what he promised in the past four years, he’s going to “tame the Deep State” that was so obstructive in his first term. Schedule F, the Department (sic) of Government Efficiency (also sic), mass return-to-office, and all the rest will put the men in gray on the run, restore political control to the executive branch, and clear out the accreted bureaucratic dysfunction of a century and change.
We’ve pretty circumspect about all that. As the estimable Theo Wold has written in our own pages, there’s plenty of reason to think Schedule F is more bark than bite. Just Monday, Austin Fairbanks of StandForTruth wrote about the various institutional dodges whereby ideologues can overwinter a hostile administration. D(sic)OGE(sic) has already lost one of its principals. The simple truth is that it is very difficult to make an organization as large as the federal government do anything in particular—2.3 million non-military, non-postal workers is a lot of people to wrangle, and difficult-to-repeal laws have been written to make it hard to fire them. This revolution may well be for TV consumption only.
On the other hand, the administrative state does seem to be—well, scared. The first instance was seen on January 13 at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which announced new rulemaking to prevent financial service companies from “debanking” customers based on First Amendment–protected speech. From the press release:
The rule would bar companies from fining, suing, or deplatforming based on consumer comments, reviews, or political or religious views. It protects consumers’ right to exercise free speech, including a consumer’s right to share negative reviews about a financial firm’s products or services, as well as political speech with which the company’s management disagrees.
This follows criticisms of CFPB from two pro-Trump Silicon Valley heavies, Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, who alleged that it targets legitimate companies for ideological reasons.
Then the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday unilaterally preempted an agenda item of the HHS secretary-select, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: the ban of Red Dye 3. While waging a holy war against Froot Loops is not high on our own policy wish-list, it is difficult not to see this as an encouraging I’m-OK-you’re-OK gesture from the career bureaucrats to their new, crunchy overlords. Apparently catering to another segment of the Trump coalition, the FDA on Thursday decided to allow the marketing of Zyn nicotine pouches—more I’m-OK-you’re-OK.
Then there was the fact that Trump’s body man for Israel–Gaza, Steve Witkoff, was praised in fulsome terms at a State Department press conference about the January 15 ceasefire deal; the spokesman running the show all but said the Trump team carried it off single-handedly. This is quite a change in tone. State’s corps of career officers and civil servants was one of the greatest frustrations to the president’s agenda in the first term. Cheering for the Donald and his merry men before the team has even entered the building is notable.
Stranger still: Your humble editor a week and a half ago got a phone call from the press officers of an executive-branch agency. They were seeking to highlight a new piece of upcoming, conservative-friendly rulemaking. I have spent almost my entire adult life in this industry, and I have never—as in, not once—ever gotten a spontaneous, friendly communication from a federal organ, let alone a request for some favorable press.
So, what does it all mean, Mr. Natural? Well, it shows a certain instinct toward self-preservation on the part of old Leviathan’s members, which means perhaps less obstruction this time around for Donald and the boys. That’s good, so far as it goes. It also seems, possibly, as if there has been some progress on the polarization front if the fourth branch of government no longer feels the need to wage open war on the nation’s duly elected chief executive.
Yet the fundamentals haven’t really changed. Just because a particular capability for abuse is not being exercised at a given moment does not mean it will not be exercised again. If you think representative government is worthwhile in even an equivocal way (which is about where your humble editor sits), the fact that the president’s agenda is moving forward at the sufferance of an unelected bureaucracy is basically as disturbing as it being blocked by the veto of an unelected bureaucracy. It’s time to press the advantage.
Trump has a mandate—not an overwhelming mandate, but a mandate nonetheless—to restore normalcy. Part of that is making the government work for the leaders the people put in charge of it. Conciliatory noises from respectable apparatchiks and experts should not put him off the trail. The acceptable terms from Leviathan are what they have always been: total and unconditional surrender.
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