Congressional Capture
Deep State, Deep Think, Deep Wrong
It’s called regulatory capture, when a government agency meant to oversee a certain industry or process is completely controlled by the people it is meant to regulate.
This is a common occurrence – the EPA is run by environmentalists, the Department of Labor has traditionally been run by union people, the Department of Education by teachers’ unions, the Department of Defense by the defense industry and so on.
In other words, the agency is a part of the industry and becomes intimately involved with the people they are meant to keep in check. Sometimes that intimacy is literal and physical, but mostly it involves being part of the joyously comfortable and siren enticing social and cultural milieu that is created by the piles of money involved.
Like trust fund kids, government employees are loathe to irk their industry co-partners lest they be cut out of the will, as it were, so it’s be nice, be on tippy-toes, and do not offend.
However much a trusty baby would want to plant a tree on a kibbutz in honor of their virulently antisemitic grandmother or get their big game hunting uncle on the PETA mailing/donation list because you either want to make a serious point or at least think it would be funny, you don’t because that could interrupt the flow of monthly money and mean you might have to get a real job.
In November, enough Americans noticed that their tax money was going to utter silliness, often specifically being spent to harm them or try to force them to change their political positions, or at the very least intentionally irritate them.
And Donald Trump is cutting off the money spigot and a certain class of people are irked.
Regulatory capture goes back generations – Ike warned about it in 1961 when he cautioned against both the military-industrial complex and the creation of a scientific research/academic establishment wholly dependent upon government largesse:
“Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers… The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
What Ike did not foresee was Congressional capture.
Without a doubt, various and sundry interest groups and industrialists and such have held massive sway in DC. Toss in a security state that knows who you are having an affair with, how much money you owe, how – amazingly – you paid off that debt in one fell swoop before a critical vote, and there has always been a symbiotically parasitic relationship between and betwixt government agencies and electeds.
But what is happening now is different – Democrats are – embarrassingly – defending the bureaucracy at all levels.
Let’s start with the unreserved – and hysterical - protest to save the egregious USAID:
For the full experience, click here.
This agency has fed hundreds of billions to overseas organizations and some of that money went to actually doing what it was supposed to do: help out with food and medicine and technical expertise in strife-ridden places.
Much has not.
Add in its interference in Hungary, it’s association with the State Department and its sister-in-crime the National Endowment for Democracy – belly button of the beast Anne Applebaum said Biden had to drop his campaign to prevent even the possibility of Trump – and that shows the agency as being even worse than can be imagined (though maybe not as bad as NED.)
It’s not an international food and medical assistance group – it’s a political public relations intelligence shop that supports the globalist socialite statist project the Democrats and, more importantly, their party members support.
But while USAID may right now be just the tip, other agencies and departments have been actively taking advantage of the Democrats shift from a big tent working class party to a progressive tornado run by dorm room three-bong-hit experts.
Which brings up the question – have the Democrats co-opted the permanent bureaucracy or is it the other way around or have they simply melded into a single rainbow Jello-y mass, a mass that is now being attacked with laser-tipped spoons by the Trump administration?
The permanent “we don’t care who is in charge – we’re here now and will be here long after he is gone” bureaucracy has served not the nation but itself for a very long time but really took off when it realized it had a possibly permanent friend in elected power.
While Republicans have for years railed against the blob, in fact they did very little, and, since the Reagan presidency, less than little to truly control the mass.
Under George W. Bush, it grew and grew not just in size but innate power, thanks largely to the Patriot Act which made pretty much everything a “national security” issue.
The guise of “national security” – a wonderful place to secretly grow power.
Under Barack Obama, the process of both regulatory power and regulatory capture sped up immeasurably.
Trump tried in his first term to stem the tide but was overwhelmed by a bureaucracy he simply didn’t understand (note- this time, he does.)
As for Biden – isn’t it wonderful when you have a boss who has no idea what is really going on? You can do anything.
Why, one may ask, is the federal government so powerful? Because that is where the money is.
Why do activists and industrialists do everything they can to make friends with the bureaucracy? Because that is where the money is.
As the interests intertwined, spending money in DC stopped just being about buying influence but more about making an investment in a company.
It became about ownership, it became about membership and membership has its privileges.
And those privileges must be protected and it’s wonderful if that can be done on the cheap.
An agency hands a few internships to the kids of big donors? Easy and it looks great on the college application.
An agency makes sure to fund a pet project of an elected? Guess who that elected owes after that?
A clear example was the explosion of DEI projects and programs and rules and bureaucrats during the past few years. This is not something the nation ever said ‘yes’ to even remotely, but it was something to increase the power of the bureaucracy – maybe the government, too, but really the people who populate the halls and cubicles of the government.
As the Democratic Party began to rely more and more on a very particular demographic group – the white and credentialed – the concept fit as it would please – and employ and grant funds to - that base.
And the party and the bureaucracy spiraled closer and closer together, like mating snakes
to become a replication machine.
That is why elected Democrats are now embarrassing themselves with their full-throated bureaucracy defense – the bureaucracy is both the party’s child and parent.
Child because the Democrats have long been the party of “big government,” parent because now the party cannot exist without the bureaucracy.
They have nothing else to offer except access to the shadowy halls of paper pushing power, halls that are now being stripped bare by Trump and his Musky Minions.
The situation is so humiliating that even Democrats are noticing that protesting the cutting off of funding of Serbian gender diversity programs is not the best way to attract the working class and independent voters or trying to shore up their dwindling advantages amongst minority voters.
A working-class Black family, a second-generation immigrant Mexican family is not looking at the Democrats defense of spending millions on gender oblivious puppet shows with any sense of approval.
Ruy Teixeira of the Liberal Patriot put it this way:
“That’s really the key and how Democrats can get out of the current “institutions trap” that brands them as the establishment party in an anti-institutional, populist era. Trump is pretty much guaranteed to do many things that are genuinely unpopular and impinge upon voters’ lives in a way that angers them in areas like health care, education, and the cost of living. Democrats should reserve their big guns for those situations. That should make them politically stronger over time and, paradoxically, make them better able to restore worthwhile USAID and other government programs over time and get many of those workers back to work.
In contrast, their current grandstanding on the USAID shutdown and other DOGE monkey business will likely do those programs and those workers no good. As that great American, Casey Stengel once remarked: “Can’t anybody here play this game?” We’re still looking Casey, we’re still looking.”
Actually, as it is currently constructed and power-based, the Democrats are not even allowed to look. Even just earlier this month, when electing a new party chairman, the national org made sure to have gender diverse representation at the national level and even chatted about paid time-off for pet bereavement.
That last bit made sound truly silly, but one must remember that the current Democrat demographic – white, wealthy gender diverse, a meaningless degree or two - is not actually having real children all that much, hence the pet.
(I guess an associate dean of diversity was jealous that their custodian got time of when her son died but she still had to come to work after her fish when belly up.)
Beyond the bureaucracy, there is of course academia and the foundations that both feed into and feed off of the existing system to which the Democrats are beholden.
Teixeira has a point, but misses a crucial element – this is not a political discussion anymore but a cultural discussion. Political alliances may come and go, but the level of familial entanglement involved makes that equation quaintly pointless now.
The Democrats took part in setting up a system in which one can move seamlessly from school to foundation to government to foundation to school to lobbying to certain preferred private sectors like tech and defense and entertainment to elected to school to staff to foundation and never have one’s feet touch the ground
And the potential end of that very convenient, very profitable system is why Democrats are so vociferously defending the bureaucracy – they are part of it and they depend upon it for the graft they can dole out.
The funding makes possible but is almost ancillary to the self-fulfilling power network created:
The money was not about helping actual real people – it was about creating an international network that could be called upon to do the bidding of the American intelligence community and the globalist socialist socialite statists, now one and the same. When you pay people they will pay you back, however they can, from writing op-eds to going on MSNBC to railing against populism – whatever you need at the moment.
In the end, there actually exists a constituency for “big government,” but not at all in any way a political constituency for “big bureaucracy.” Defending regulations? Maybe, sure. Defending red tape? No, never.
The Democrats have to end their Congressional capture by the bureaucracy, no matter how much it will hurt in the short term, if they are to ever have a hope of becoming a party that appeals once again to an actually – not academically, not genderly, not wokily – diverse and strong swath of the population.
If, after November, the Democrats still don’t get that they don’t get anything at all.
And they never will.