Javier Milei, newly-elected President of Argentina is famous for holding up a magnetic board with the names of all the federal departments on it. One by one with a flourish and a loud Afuera! he tosses each one into the trash bin at his side. Department of Education? Afuera! Department of Social Welfare? Afuera! On and on until only a few essential departments are left. 'No hay plata', he says when asked how and under what authority and auspices he could wreak such havoc on the organs of state.
'No money', he replied, 'No money' and in one fell swoop, he cleared the decks for running, unclogged the lanes filled with flotsam and jetsam and burned all dead wood in a great, cleansing, purifying bonfire.
The Old Left, the residual Peronistas who had still remained in Buenos Aires were shocked. Years, decades of building up the state, expanding and extending its coverage, and introducing and maintaining it in every nook and cranny of the nation, this interloper was tearing it down, unceremoniously tossing aside hallowed, principled, institutions of the state, leaving governance to the wolves of the private sector.
Yet within months, Milei's sweeping reformation of government began to take hold. Inflation for decades in three and sometimes four figures began to come down, hope that somehow the wild economic and financial instability of the nation would end and Argentina could re-enter the commonwealth of nations. For years the country had been a joke. From Eva Peron to the Colonels to round after round of open-sluiced, government for the governing, the country - a rich, developed, civilized place in the past called the Austral Paris - had been a laughing stock, a fumbling, idealistic land of show and ceremony and nothing else. Now, with Milei, that would all be over.
Every Republican Administration has tried to reduce the size and influence of government ever since Ronald Reagan famously said, 'Government is not the solution. It is the problem'; but bureaucracies are living organisms - amoebic protoplasm which oozes and shifts, fills empty spaces then leaves them for other quarters, always alive and always growing. Shut one door and another opens. Close one office and all its papers, files, archives, and personnel appear somewhere else.
It is a creature, bureaucracy, an ever-present one which by its permanence if nothing else, cannot be ignored. The White House may float an idea, Congress may pass it into law, but then it is thrown into the maw of the bureaucracy where it lives, is owned, and will morph, fester,, and eventually die.
Bureaucracies live for themselves, inward thinking, self-preserving, territorial, and amoral. They exist to exist, living and growing on other people's money, cloaked with the mantel of stewardship. If the Department of Education doesn't look after the welfare of our children, who will? As such, they grow, divisions are added and subdivisions under them, until each department is a maze, a warren of marginally connected, incidentally independent boluses of self interest.
When Milei shouted Afuera! that was just the opening act for Donald Trump. The encrusted, entrenched, money-sucking federal bureaucracy will be blasted forever out of existence.
He has already made it clear that the Department of Education will be the first to go, and well it should. Education in America has always been a local affair, governed by school boards and their administrators, overseen and watchdogged by the PTA. There is nothing more local in governance than education, so why is there a federal agency involved? Ah, say advocates, to assure uniformity and the introduction and national application of overarching ideas.
It was the Department of Education, aided and abetted by the powerful Teachers' Union which thought it a good idea to add 'self-esteem', 'multiple intelligences', 'gender affirmation', and 'social integration' to the standard curriculum - a curriculum most children were failing, in need of constant remedial help, and moved up and out in an atmosphere of academic indifference. If there ever was an unnecessary, politically-driven, useless federal agency, it was the Department of Education, never there to help only to push its own vaporous agenda.
Why is there a Department of Labor when labor issues are private, industrial matters of negotiation, strikes, walkouts, shutdowns, and ultimate supply-and-demand resolve? Why a Department of Commerce when the economy is one of the freest in the world, and matters of trade are either subject to the same supply and demand forces as in microeconomics, or geopolitical ones settled by Presidents? Health is a private concern in America with the triad of private physicians, private insurers, and private pharmaceutical companies in full control, so why a Department of Health? On and on ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
However, at any intimation of reduction in force, rationalization, or removal, the bureaucracy howls. How could you? How can you? How dare you? And in most cases the breast-beating and rending of garments works. The White House and a supportive Congress have no idea how big, resistant, and self-important the bureaucracy really is.
This time it will be different, insists Donald Trump, and he has created a unit headed by a billionaire genius, Elon Musk, and his equally talented and committed associate, Vivek Ramaswamy. Neither one has any taste for government, nor any middling sympathy for Washington. They are tasked with improving efficiency, but anyone with the patience to look beyond the title knows this means removing the great, heaving, Washington behemoth. With the White House, Senate, and House behind them, hold on to your hats.
'What's a mother do do?', asked one bureaucrat in her chair in the Division of Academic Equity, a unit of the Department of Education set up to promote cooperative learning - the more intellectually advantaged helping the less so - an idealistic, hopeless venture that discouraged the intelligent and sent them packing for private schools, and did nothing to budge the needle on the dumb, hopelessly vacant students with little or no parental support, lost, and still trying to figure out 1+1 in the fifth grade.
She would soon be given her walking papers, unceremoniously left on the curb by the unsympathetic likes of Musk and Ramaswamy. Can't find a job in the private sector after sucking the public teat for a generation? Sorry. Afuera!
'See those buildings there', a longtime Washingtonian said to a newcomer, pointing out the bank of federal buildings along Independence Avenue. 'You could eliminate one-third of the people working there, and no one would even notice'; and that was a gross underestimation. Scores of independent management consulting groups - McKinsey, Deloitte, and Bain among others - have suggested far more. Why and how the American public could have put up with such waste, intellectual fraud, and gross inefficiency for so long is the question. However Musk and Ramaswamy could care less about the whys of bureaucracies, only the need to get rid of them.
This enterprise is at the heart of the Trump counterrevolution - getting rid of bureaucracies means gutting the government, leaving the country free to operate with limited regulation, maximum incentive, and few incarcerating rules of behavior. A free country, says Trump, is a country without government, and tens of millions of voters agreed. Expunging the last noxious bit of wokism is one thing, ridding the country of an intrusive, self-serving, venal government is entirely another. The heart of the matter.
Of all else - reduction of taxes, energy independence, closed borders, a muscular foreign policy, judicial reform - the radical elimination of unnecessary federal agencies is perhaps the most important. If government goes, then the country is free to prosper. No arrogated federal bureaucrat is taking your money for 'investments' that have nothing to do with your well being, profligately spent with no discernable impact, and replenished regardless of outcome. Afuera!
Washington, like Buenos Aires, will never be the same, a shadow of its former self; but the rest of the country will give a big sigh of relief. The era of big government is coming to an end.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.