Destruction of the administrative state

Two old men (one 82, other 78 — if I say boomers, Bill Maher may take offence) walked into a hall. They were meeting publicly after nearly four years. The last time they met, the older one was more coherent, the younger one (facepalm) less prosecuted. Together, they debated policies in front of cameras and two hosts

for ninety minutes. This is our life now. Two elderly men are discussing their fitness for the most powerful executive office in the world. In fairness, President Biden has made it clear that he is in the race only until Trump is in the race. If Trump drops out (along with other small mercies like hell freezing over), Biden is gone, too. But it seems most likely that neither will, and we shall shortly see why. But here is the deal first. While there was no moral vindication for Trump in the debate, the optics of it were not very kind to Biden either.

Trump is running again, and I think he will keep running for as long as he is alive because America’s political right has seen nothing like him for a long, long time. What he did for the conservative majority in the Supreme Court alone has no recent parallels. Remember the overturning of the Roe v Wade verdict? So, they badly want him back in power. How badly, we see shortly.

But the bigger question is not Trump. It is President Biden’s health. If you trust the right-wing pundits, he is sleepwalking into the shadowland of dementia. And since the mainstream media is a great place to lobby for succession and external influence, its movers and shakers, too, have been depicting him in that light. Granted, the first presidential debate did not help his cause. But even if health is a concern, isn’t there a vice president for the exact same reason? To step in when the president is unwell? Well, propagandists got there too. Throughout her term, the media has done little else than depict her as a poor manager and, in other words, a coloured version of Selina Meyer from the hit HBO series ‘Veep’. So, you have to wonder why a media ecosystem that so vociferously pushed her name for the veep nominee from among all black female candidates that Biden was considering at the time, had a dramatic change of heart? You want to know the answer? There is only token black presence among the movers and shakers of the said ecosystem. But there is no dearth of Indian influence there. So, the said influencers must have thought she might be good for India’s influence like Nikki Haley once was. But when they realised that she, like most Indian American lawmakers, is ferociously independent, progressive and unapologetically American, they soured on her. Lucky for America, it got a brilliant veep out of all this. But as a consequence of this souring, an overwhelmingly overqualified presidential candidate was subjected to countless unflattering stereotypes.

If you think that makes the voter’s choice easy, you couldn’t be more wrong. Rumours about Biden’s health have been circulated in the media since his first day in office. But even then, and despite some serious roadblocks like inflation and the immigration challenges at the Southern border, he is still neck and neck with Trump. And if you adjust for the media’s anti-Biden, anti-Harris bias due to the dissatisfaction of Modi and Netanyahu’s minions in the ecosystem, these ratings might even be higher. Why would that be?

If an ordinary candidate could beat Trump, we wouldn’t have to endure the shock of 2016. But Biden did. And there is a reason. As recently created anti-Biden black Public Action Committees have learned at their own cost, Biden’s black support base remains rock solid. And that is not all, unlike Hillary Clinton, who alienated Sanders’ supporters, the incumbent US president has brought back the Latino and progressive support and stitched together a coalition which is even bigger than Obama’s. So, the safest bet is that as long as Biden is breathing, he can beat Trump. But this is not acceptable to the agents of chaos. If their purpose were to bring Trump back into power, one could make peace with that. But remember, for how long did Nikki Haley refuse to quit the race in the vain hope that Trump might get disqualified by the courts? It looks like the far-right elements among America’s allies consider it a moral inconvenience and want it consumed by inner divisions even at the cost of risking another civil war. That is why an irreconcilable conflict is being manufactured out of which no one emerges unharmed.

But America hasn’t become a superpower through pure coincidence. No matter how wishfully Fareed Zakaria predicts its decline while benefitting from its system, America did not just win a civil war but even managed to rise as a power. There must be contingencies to thwart any untoward incident. So, that outcome doesn’t interest us right now.

What interests us is the scenario where Trump wins. ‘Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’ recently did a segment on the potential Trump 2.0 presidency, and man, it is an eye-opener. If you have been paying attention to America’s judicial politics, you must be familiar with the conservative Federalist Society. For others, it is a body which provided a step-by-step guide to the Trump administration to appoint three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, changing for a long time the balance between liberal and conservative sides.

Following its footsteps, over a hundred conservative organisations led by the Heritage Foundation have produced a similar administrative roadmap for Trump 2.0 titled ‘Project 2025’. The document aims to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, and eliminate the departments of education and commerce, among many other changes. It draws on the Reagan era’s ‘unitary executive theory’ to present a plan to make the US Congress irrelevant. This plan includes impoundment, an outlawed use of the 2^nd amendment to divert the Congress-appropriated funds to the executive branch. But its sinister masterstroke lies in the domain of restructuring the bureaucracy and how staffing works. America has 2 million federal merit-based career employees whose job is not affected by the change of government and who have robust job protections. And about four thousand political appointees who come and go with different administrations. The ‘Schedule F’ seeks to reclassify fifty thousand career employees as political ones, effectively transforming a republic into an autocracy.

Does it ring a bell? Do you remember Steve Bannon’s CPAC outburst about deconstructing the administrative state? Well, this is that with a treasure map attached.

In David Cameron’s austerity drive, which destroyed the NHS and produced countless other disasters and America’s own failing healthcare system, we have seen this picture already. In India’s paper leaks and unfilled vacancies, there is more proof that while bureaucracies might sometimes be corrupt and inefficient, nothing beats corporate greed and exploitation.

I prefer smaller governments, but not like this. The past decade has shown us that all this corporate-sponsored desperation to bring back Trump or to destroy the system needs to be given a drubbing of a lifetime. And therein lies Biden’s superpower. All he needs to do is breathe.