“The greatest threat to our Republic is the unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy”
To describe why understanding this rule is so critical to making sure we protect freedom and opportunity for our children, I have a story that demonstrates how the bureaucracy spends its time trying to manipulate elected officials. Keep in mind, when I was in the Senate, I was the only Republican on a three member budget committee that spent over $50 billion in state and federal money and oversaw about 60,000 total employees. Pete Wilson was Governor, and I was brand new to the Senate Committee and actual oversight of the very large, and very expensive health and welfare budgets in state government.
The chief bureaucrat of one of departments (which, in California government is called the “career executive assignment (CEA),” that is, a permanent bureaucrat that had worked himself up the bureaucracy to become the chief advisor to the politically appointed head of the department) came to my office to defend a relatively large increase in personnel for his department. The Democrat chairman of the committee proposed eliminating some (though not all) of the proposed personnel positions. This CEA told me the reason the Democrats wanted to eliminate these positions was because these positions were critical to implement Governor Wilson’s welfare reform proposals.
I voted against the increase because I had learned that there is always a good excuse for bigger government, and I saw this as that excuse. I actually had several people in the Legislature and the Governor’s office tell me that I was undermining crucial reforms to reduce the size of the welfare rolls.
Two years later, Gray Davis was elected, and Republicans proposed elimination of these same positions, which had been budgeted, but never filled, because they were never filled. The bureaucracy had taken the money budgeted for these positions and used that money for something else. This exact same bureaucrat, who still occupied the same position he had in the Wilson administration, was now working for a Democrat appointee to head of the same department, declared to the Democrat chair of the committee that the whole reason Republicans wanted to eliminate these positions was to deprive those in need in society of critical welfare checks. Exact same guy, exact same program, exact same proposal, that is, hire more people into the bureaucracy, justified to Republicans as a Democrat plot to undermine welfare reform and to Democrats as a Republican plot to undermine welfare.
These bureaucrats are unelected, unaccountable, and their whole purpose is to protect the power and influence of the bureaucracy.
There are 120 legislators in Sacramento, and 300,000 people in the bureaucracy. The CEAs in each of these departments have one purpose, that is, to build their bureaucratic empires and do that by convincing political appointees of the Governor and 41 Assembly members and 21 Senators to give them more power and influence. It is true in local governments and in the federal government. Each of the bureaucratic structures in each of those levels of government want to increase their power and influence. It is that vast bureaucratic structure we talk about when we talk about the swamp, and that swamp exists in every government structure in our country. They are unelected, unaccountable, and focused on their personal interests and not the interests of the voters.
The Democrats have sold out completely to this bureaucracy. Since government unions are their major contributors, and these same government unions make more money when there are more government employees, because they receive union “dues” from the increased number of employees. Those “dues” are then cycled part to increase the salary of the union bosses, and then directed to Democrat politicians as campaign contributions. The promise of large paychecks to high level employees, like the CEAs, give the promise of large paychecks to the hundred of thousands of line employees. They know if they stay loyal to the bureaucracy, they will be paid off as they advance through the ranks of the bureaucracy. It becomes an evil power structure, government unions get money and power from union dues, which increase as the number of dues paying employees increases, and Democrat officeholders obtain power and money for elections with higher contributions from the government unions, and each of them feed the other with the tax dollars collected to feed the power structure.
If one studies what caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, one would find this same evil swamp. The only difference between what is happening in our country today and what happened in the Soviet Union is that in the Soviet Union, the government union was called the Communist Party, and there was only one. Here we have several government unions, but they all join together to accomplish their joint goals of expanding government employees, power, and increased taxes, basically to take our money by force and use it for their personal benefit.
Ultimately, this swamp becomes impervious to political criticism, because they have so much control over the life and wealth of the governed that those who oppose the swamp are bankrupted and destroyed by the swamp. We saw that effort directed against Donald Trump. He had the money and personal strength to fight the swamp, no matter how they came at him with local, state and federal functionaries to take his money and throw him in jail. Most people don’t have that. Even people like Rudy Guiliani, who one would think could have resisted the destruction, get eaten up by destruction directed at them when they challenge the power of the bureaucracy. And if you are less well known than Guiliani, like John Eastman, your destruction for opposing the swamp is almost inevitable.
Ultimately, opposition gets silenced by this structure. Heroes may sacrifice their life to fight for freedom, but I know almost no one who will go bankrupt to protect those same freedoms. If you go bankrupt in the defense of freedom, you still have to go home at night and explain to your family why there is no food on the table. That deters most people with some level of honor from picking the fight in the first place. When that happens, real freedom is dead.
We are dangerously close to that situation now, and it is being pursued and executed by the swamp things that live off the power of government. I personally fear for our children ever knowing the freedom we enjoyed through most of our lives. We will either destroy the swamp or it will destroy our nation.