Drain the Swamp, 6/13
What an aggressive conservative might attempt
Reading Scott Atlas’s book, one comes away with a very strange picture of how Washington worked in the first year of the pandemic. Once Trump gave the green light to lockdowns, the permanent bureaucracy had all it needed. In fact, this happened even before Trump approved it: the Department of Health and Human Services had already released its lockdown blueprint on March 13, 2020, a document which had already been weeks in the preparation. After the March 16 press conference, there was no going back. The “deep state” – by which I mean the permanent non-appointed bureaucracy and the pressure groups to which it answers – was running the show.
The implications extend far beyond the CDC. It applies to every executive agency of the federal government. They ostensibly operate under the authority of the office of the president but actually not even that is true. There are severe restrictions in place on the ability of the elected president to fire anyone among them.
. . .Uprooting the entrenched, arrogant, hegemonic, and unaccountable administrative state that believes it operates with no limit to its power is the great challenge of our time.
I think that if a President were really determined to get control of the government, he could do it. I just do not think that Donald Trump had the skill and determination required.
I sensed on March 19, 2020, that to handle COVID we needed a bureaucratic shakeup. Mr. Trump should have sensed it even sooner, because he was seeing these bunglers close up.
Within the government, there are entire agencies as well as sections within agencies that have been either captured by the left or were designed to be outposts of the left from the beginning. Abolishing some of these sections might require Congressional support. Abolishing entire agencies almost surely would require Congressional support. But appointing strong leaders to head the agencies could go a long way toward reducing the harm that they can do during an Administration.
Unfortunately, we typically do not have a President with the time and the inclination to actually take over the government. That is one of the reasons why I propose the COO/CA model.
"I think that if a President were really determined to get control of the government, he could do it."
In anything even close to the present system, no way. No tweaks can fix this. You *might* be able to pass structural reforms just under the threshold of what SCOTUS deems requires a Constitutional Amendment like New Deal 2.0, but it would have to be change of that scale.
So, sure, maybe a President can nudge the course of the aircraft carrier a few minutes of a degree, ok. But anything meaningful is almost impossible without radical changes to the way things work.
He certainly cannot do it by 'himself' (i.e., the Presidency / Administration of poliitcal appointees.) He would need 60 Senators and five Supreme Court Justices to fully back his plays (in reality, not just fake public signals) or else be willing to go to total war on day one in a Constitutional-crisis-level game of chicken. For example, an actual prolonged government shutdown to include military and transfer payments.
Our present system - both in design and in practice - requires a minimum amount of comity and forebearance and simply cannot function in a two-party environment of permanent maximum hardball. At least, not in the way that would allow a Republican President to achieve outcomes despite the opposition of the bureacracy and courts.
I think you wrong, very wrong, about what a U.S. President can do without the support of the bureaucracy. On March 16, 2020, I sensed that Trump had been ambushed by The Deep State and I had a big fight with my Californian son (he had been working with federal and state officials for 27 years in large engineering projects) and I bet him that Trump would be asking for terminating it after the first two weeks. They had lied to Trump with the nonsense projections prepared by the U.K. academic criminals and I bet that by the end of the two weeks he would know it. Let me remember you that Robert Mueller spent over 30 million dollars to support his lies long enough to influence the mid-term election and he is still out of jail thanks to The Deep State.
Regardless of your proposal to reform government, the Trump presidency was never go to succeed for the same reasons that Ross Perot couldn't succeed aggravated by the emergence of the barbarians frustrated by Obama's failures (yes, the senile President is the best evidence of how grotesque Obama's two-term presidency was).