The aggressive attempts by the Trump administration to dismantle one of their perceived political enemies’ power bases by the same “pen and phone” Executive Order fiat that substantially built that base is a fascinating example of RC Dean’s Iron Laws at work. Somehow the step-children of the Republican Party, the wallflowers too ugly to get asked to dance, ended up miraculously winning many a geek’s high-school fantasy. Nearly unlimited power and no reason not to take it out on their enemies. What happens when the people running the Executive Branch decide that the rank and file of many of the agencies they administer are the enemy?
Well, you start by naming other Republican misfit/misanthrope types to run several departments that you believe are hostile to your cause. Putting an O&G guy in charge of the State Department, a Federalist in charge of the EPA, a voucher advocate in charge of the Department of Education, a black brain-surgeon who thinks that public housing stints should be brief in charge of HUD, and a man who once couldn’t even be bothered to remember the name of the Department of Energy (but knew he wanted to cut it) to direct it. Whoever is pulling the strings in the Trump administration, they did an excellent job of putting “qualified” individuals at the helm who wanted to wreck the progressive agenda that the type of people who use the words “Deep State” believe these agencies promote.
After you finish setting out to sow confusion in the board room, you move on to proposing that a bunch of the rank and file (especially in departments you perceive to be most hostile) no longer work for you:
He’s worried about the administration’s proposed 37 percent cut to the State Department, which he says would put U.S. diplomats serving abroad at risk.The Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department, the Commerce Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development are also facing steep cuts. Foreign Policy reported Monday that the administration wants to cut funding for United Nations programs by 50 percent to 60 percent.
But everyone knows that the type of middle-manager who carves out their own little bureaucratic fiefdom and burrows in like a tick on a dog is going to avoid falling to those cuts. They have to keep their job because they are the Deputy Assistant Director for Left-Handedness in Prairie Voles and that exists on an org chart, so they can’t be fired because who would direct that work? Anyone who has worked for a giant organization that has experienced organic growth knows that the only way to get rid of that type of person is a reorg. Oh wait, did someone say reorg?
RC Dean’s Iron Laws are being used against the regulatory state here to great effect. Perhaps the one that seems to be biting most painfully is me today, you tomorrow. Presidents have been stretching the edges of their power since Washington, but in the current century it seems to have become particularly egregious. Driven by the combination of Congress’s ceding of statutory rule-making to the Executive Branch, the Chevron precedent in 1984 telling Federal Courts to side with administrative rule-makers at all costs, and the broad adoption of the computer, we have seen the Executive agencies under each president make regulations that constrain the ordinary citizen from engaging in just about anything. It is interesting to watch a populist who cares only for ratings and a bunch of people who have been marginalized in the Republican party for years suddenly find themselves using the power to dismantle parts of the state that libertarians dislike. Of course, they are also bulking up the parts that libertarians hate most. I don’t see a lot of love in the comments for the TSA and Border Patrol, nor much will to reinvigorate the military so that we can fight all the rest of the world at once, but that appears to be happening as well.
The Trump Administration also appears to have taken the Iron Law you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish to heart as well. For both good and ill to the broad libertarian view. Rarely have we had the opportunity to experience the impartial laws of government work in any context that could even broadly be described as not entirely horrible. You might have to go all the way back to the Carter presidency to find someone who accidentally struck a blow for not quite as effective citizen enslavement. Trump’s administration will not be a friend of libertarians, but as long as the wind of “fuck government regulators” keeps blowing, he might be a slightly mitigated disaster.
