As President Trump continues to impose his will on numerous government agencies, his critics become increasingly angry—and helpless. At their point in his presidency, we are seeing two opposite and irreconcilable narratives, with neither really being correct.
The anti-Trump legions believe the following: Donald Trump is laying waste to the most important, even sacred, federal agencies and departments. For example, David French writes in The New York Times that Trump had exploded an “atomic bomb” on the Department of Justice, while Robert F. Kennedy at Health and Human Services is destroying our entire public health infrastructure with his vaccine skepticism and other moves that are enraging health experts.
On the other side, the narrative is that Trump is finally cleaning out the swamp and bringing sanity and integrity to government agencies that too long have been part of the Deep State, which has been promoting and protecting pharmaceutical firms and other politically-connected industries—to the detriment of most Americans. It is obvious that one cannot reconcile one set of beliefs with the other, so one is supposed to believe that what Trump is doing is unprecedented in our history, or he is doing what has needed to be done for decades but had not because no one in the White House had the political will to step forward.
So, how do we form opinions on what we are seeing? Given Trump’s in-your-face pronouncements in his speeches and on forums like X and Truth Social, one cannot be neutral about him, but there is a way to make better sense of what is happening, and it involves taking a different look at the vast entity known as the federal government.
The Progressive Narrative on Federal Government Growth
The standard American history class has always been built upon narratives, and when it comes to the growth of the federal government, especially during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, the most common explanation is that the proliferation of federal regulatory agencies came about to deal with market failures. The Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1887 to deal with abuses of the railroads; the Food and Drug Administration was created because Americans were being poisoned by greedy, profit-seeking food companies; the Federal Reserve System came about to counter the inevitable boom-and-bust cycles caused by capitalist greed. And so on.
If there was an agency formed, there was a market failure behind it and, more importantly, the federal agency either solved the failure or at least helped to mitigate its consequences. Furthermore, in keeping with Progressive dogma, those agencies were staffed with experts who eschewed politics and simply applied their superior knowledge to solving problems. Whether we read modern journalism or listen to the news or sit in a high school or college classroom, the narrative is the same: federal entities from the Center for Disease Control to the US Department of Education offer the thin line of protection from rapacious capitalists and anti-education activists who want us to be unhealthy and ignorant so they can further prey upon us and become rich.
If there ever is criticism of these government entities in the mainstream media, academe, or politics, it is that they have not done enough to protect us from these market failures. Despite the volume of academic literature on capture theory, along with books like Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises and Power and Market by Murray Rothbard that clearly point out why these agencies will not perform as progressives demand, the same narratives persist.
Thus, when Trump and Kennedy take on the Centers for Disease Control, they do so because they want people to die of infectious diseases like measles and polio. There can be no other reason because, supposedly, everyone knows that the CDC and all the other health bureaucracies are the main reason people live healthy lives. Likewise, the Department of Education exists solely to serve and support the vast system of government schools in this country, and any other viewpoint of that entity is damnable heresy.
For example, Robert Reich, a darling of the Democratic Party left, insists that the only reason the Trump administration has tried to end funding for the Public Broadcasting System is that he wants American children to be ignorant, since, he claims, that “Sesame Street” “has helped children learn to read and count for over half a century.” He writes:
Why is Trump trying to cancel “Sesame Street,” which has helped children learn to read and count for over half a century?
Why is he seeking to destroy Harvard University?
Why is he trying to deter the world’s most brilliant scientists from coming to the United States?
Because he is trying to destroy American education — and with it, the American mind.
Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated public.
Slaveholders prohibited enslaved people from learning to read. The Third Reich burned books. The Khmer Rouge banned music. Stalin and Pinochet censored the media.
And Trump, like past authoritarians, wants to control not just what we do, but also how and what we think.
In other words, Reich is equating the stated purpose of an agency or organization with its wished-for outcomes, not its actual outcomes. After all, the US had widespread literacy long before “Sesame Street” appeared on Public TV. The Public Broadcasting System came about in 1967 following then-Federal Communications Commissioner Newton Minow’s famous 1961 “vast wasteland” characterization of commercial television in which he called for programming “in the public interest.”
For that matter, we have seen three spectacular government failures in the past 25 years, from the 9/11 attacks that lead to the failures of US invasions and attempts at “nation building” of Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 financial meltdown centered around a housing bubble, and the covid debacle led by the National Institutes for Health and the Centers for Disease Control. Yet, in all of those cases, the government agencies in the middle of these self-made crises gained even more power and authority despite the fact that they all were well-funded even before disaster hit.
In his excellent book Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs documents how governments both create crises and then grab increasing amounts of power and authority during the crisis period, or what he calls the “ratchet effect” in which government always ends up with more power and authority after a so-called crisis, in part because elites and those that benefit from government power publicly demand more of it. For example, a couple weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Wall Street Journal columnist Al Hunt wrote “Government to the Rescue” without acknowledging that the attacks themselves occurred because of massive government failure.
As for government failures, Paul Krugman writes that they occur because at times those in charge of government agencies don’t believe the progressive hype. For example, in the aftermath of the federal government’s pathetic response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans 20 years ago, Krugman blamed it upon a lack of faith in government itself, writing:
But the federal government’s lethal ineptitude wasn’t just a consequence of Mr. Bush’s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn’t forthcoming?
Power Grabs at the DOJ
The aforementioned article by David French reflects the narrative-driven approach to how mainstream journalists report on the Trump administration. According to French, before Trump, the DOJ was the picture of integrity:
As the Nixon administration (among others) demonstrated, an “imperial presidency” courts corruption and abuse. To counter this temptation, the Department of Justice, acting under presidents of both parties, has created a series of rules and procedures designed to ensure fairness and impartiality.
As one who has written numerous articles and academic papers on federal criminal law and the DOJ, I can say without reservation that French has written pure fiction. Just a few weeks ago in my review of Blowback, I showed how DOJ agents engaged in murder and then a criminal coverup of their deeds, with the one leading the coverup, Eric Holder, becoming the US Attorney General during the Barack Obama administration.
In the Regulation article, “Federal Crimes and the Destruction of Law,” I showed how the sheer scale and scope of federal criminal law enabled FBI agents and federal prosecutors to target nearly any individual or group they choose. Although French claims that DOJ policy ensures that agents “takes steps to protect the identities of people who might be relevant to a criminal case, but are not charged,” in practice, prosecutors and others in the DOJ regularly leak such information and more to the media when they believe they can make it impossible for someone charged to receive a fair trial. After all, federal agents do not arrest and prosecute themselves.
Furthermore, while Trump clearly is open to criticism for his actions at the DOJ, he is not doing anything unprecedented. Again, we are given the narrative of an incorruptible Justice Department filled with men and women of the highest integrity whose only goal is to enforce the laws of the United States with fairness and justice—and then Trump came along. The DOJ’s history, as many have noted, renders the standard narrative as nothing but propaganda. As Harvey Silverglate pointed out in Three Felonies a Day, neither the FBI nor federal prosecutors are rewarded for showing integrity and often finds that crime pays very well when it is the government agents that can commit them. Instead, they do what they believe will advance their careers, and telling the truth does not always accomplish that personal goal.
Conclusion
In the classrooms, on the evening news, and in the pages of The New York Times, we are fed fictional narratives that federal agencies supposedly operate with nothing but the best intentions on “correcting” market failures and improving the lives of Americans. Thus, anything that interferes with these agencies or reduces the number of government employees is harmful to this country.
The progressive dream of a government run by experts that can fix any problem, heal people from diseases, and adequately protect citizens from predators is just that: a dream. Experience and history tell us that government agents—whether working for the CDC or the FBI—are going to serve their own interests and the interests of their employers, not the interests of the people they purport to serve. While Donald Trump may be acting out of selfish ambition or using the apparatus of the state to reward himself and his friends and punish his perceived enemies, he hardly differs from the presidents that preceded him in how he has used federal agencies.
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