By Steven Jonas
Steve Bannon
was one of the principals in the Trump presidential campaign. With
Kelly Ann (Alternative Facts) Conway (formerly a pollster, which could
account for why she is such a lousy front-person for Trump) Bannon came
over from the Ted Cruz campaign when it ended. Cruz had been funded by
the far-right winger Robert Mercer,
who brought his money with him to Trump. (Among other things, Mercer
was also a funder of Brexit and climate change denial.) Bannon brought
with him his concept of "The Deconstruction of the Administrative
State." This was his fancy term for destroying as much of the Federal
bureaucracy as possible, given that those particular pieces of the
bureaucracy for which he advocated destruction stood in the way, in any
way, of private profit-making. In this he was following in the steps of
one Grover Norquist,
an advisor to George W. Bush, who famously said "our objective is to
shrink the Federal government to the size of a bath-tub and then drown
it in the bath-tub."
Of course the elements of the Federal government which
Bannon/Norquist (and just about the whole of the Republican Party since
the time of Newt Gingrich, a Norquist devotee) were/are such elements as
the Environmental Protection Administration, elements of the Department
of Agriculture aimed at corporate farming (and pollution), the
Department of Labor in general, the National Labor Relations Board, the
Department of Education in relation to religious schools and its
poisonous relative home-schooling, and so on and so forth.
Of course, the anti-[certain-parts-of] Federal government policy
is an important strain of Republican doctrine that goes back to the Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.
It does not include such regulatory agencies at the Federal prison
system, the Department of Homeland Security and its active
anti-undocumented persons division, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE), and of course the Department of Defense. Even though Trump and
his minions went full force into "Deconstruction," Bannon himself didn't
last long. He was probably just too smart for Trump to have hanging
around.
Among the collateral damage of "getting rid of regulation to open up the free market" was the demolition of White House's National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense (an action Trump has had considerable trouble trying to explain) and major elements of such agencies as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
While the bulk of the cutbacks and major changes in regulations were
made to increase the power of major U.S. corporations to make profits,
there was also the collateral damage brought on by a combination of
budget-cutting for anything other than the Military-Industrial Complex
and to support tax cuts for the wealthy and the large corporations, and
Trump's visceral hatred for any innovative Federal program associated
with President Obama. But the important point here is that the Bannon
Doctrine of the Deconstruction of the Administrative State has had a
major negative impact on the Trump Administration's ability to respond
appropriately to the oncoming disaster.
If Bannon himself, an apparently intelligent and well-educated man,
had been asked "Well, do you include in 'Deconstruction' such elements
of the Federal government as those designed to ward off or minimize
epidemics," he probably would have said "No." But the combination of
his destructive construct, traditional Republican budget cutting for any
regulatory functions, and Trump's Obama-hatred doomed the various
Federal programs that could have made the Trumpidemic2020© much less
worse than it is, to a combination of extinction, diminution, and poor
leadership (chosen more for political adherence that expertise [sound
familiar?]).
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