A remarkable event happened this week, something I’ve dreamed about most of my professional life but has only now taken place. A panoply of government agencies actually experienced dramatic cuts in personnel. The Department of Health and Human Services has cut at least 10,000 and maybe as many as 20,000 jobs—the precise number is unclear—all in one fell swoop.
The employees lined up to go to work only to find their keycards did not work. They were locked out of email and other portals. They were physically presented with packets explaining the restructuring and their options. In other words, they were treated like countless others in private-sector employment in the past: they were fired. This they could not believe because this is the rarest thing imaginable in government, which is one reason government employment is so notorious.
Some employees who could not be fired for reasons of contract were reassigned to Indian Health Services in far-flung places. Yes, this really happened.
This took place under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., with the permission of and encouraged by President Donald Trump. The background for this stunning move—the deepest one-day cuts to a single agency in U.S. history—is of course the incredibly botched response to the virus of 2020 and following, during which times the public-health agencies panicked and took away most of the liberties that Americans had taken for granted.
We are still working through precisely what happened in those COVID days and why they continued for so long, even for years, with zero evidence that anything like this was necessary. So many people suffered, including doctors who were denied professional autonomy to treat their patients according to their own lights and training.
To understand the hows and whys of this period of our lives requires a very deep dive into every field of science, philosophy, psychology, and probably religion too.
In the end, the whole puzzle is mystifying but this much became clear: these bureaucracies needed cleaning up. Clearly.
Kennedy was the leading dissident, writing fully two books on the subject, and speaking the world over, and was then tapped to lead the health agencies that he had opposed. Joining him in this effort were others who opposed what was happening, including the new NIH head Jay Bhattacharya, who was first denounced and then censored by the previous agency heads.
The rise, fall, and rise of these people—from prestigious positions to dissidents to censored to becoming in charge of the agencies that censored them—is itself a remarkable story worthy of great literature and film. Now they are in a position to act on their experience and knowledge.
Now comes the turnabout. The restructuring is here, and justice is being done, which is oddly not something we’ve come to expect in the world of government. In the reporting on the upheaval in the agencies, however, the legacy media did not mention the lockdowns and shot mandates of the previous period, strangely pretending as if they were not the essential prequel to the current drama.
This is because the entirety of the period from 2020 to 2023 has entered into the category of taboo because nearly the entirety of the media and corporate establishment went along with this entire episode.
The response is in place but I can entirely understand why the man on the street would be mystified about the goings-on. They might at first seem to be “inside baseball” but actually the implications are profound for civil liberties, human rights, and constitutional government. The COVID response disregarded all those things but now we have in place a group of people who are seeking to right the wrongs.
There is something impenetrable and implacable about bureaucratic structures. They tend never to shrink but only grow, even when there is no basis for it. They aspire to grow ever more with ever more employees. This is how they define success. If you don’t believe me, just speak to anyone who has ever worked in one. They will tell you.
Years ago and for reasons I cannot entirely remember, I found myself at a meeting of the deep bureaucracies of some city bureaucracy within the local government of Washington, D.C., one that specialized in child and family issues. The top agency bureaucrat was speaking to a group of graduating students looking for jobs. Her entire pitch was about how they were hiring, their job benefits, the job security, the growth of the agency, the money pouring in from taxpayers, and the future of how the agency can only get bigger.
The missing part was anything to do with the function and mission of the agency itself. It’s as if the whole enterprise has become a giant jobs program and grift for those lucky enough to be hired. This much was obvious to me. And I found it startling. All my professional experience thus far had been in private-sector jobs where you did the work and brought value or else faced termination. This was something I took for granted.
Bureaucracies do not work like this. They have no profitability statements. It is just money in and money out, regardless of whether and to what extent they actually achieve their aims. They are all this way. You can say they are necessary, which is fine, but they all face the same problem if they are funded by tax dollars. The institutional incentive to achieve the goal, control costs, and improve efficiency is simply not there.
How can public-sector bureaucracies be controlled? Only through political management. And herein lies the problem. Most political authorities have no real incentive to do anything about them. For this reason, the number of agencies in Washington and in all states tends only to grow in budget, personnel, and power, year after year, and decade after decade. The institutional ethos of these places is to presume that this will always be the case.
The typical government agency embeds an expectation that all threats from newly elected politicians can be ignored. Politicians are transitory whereas the agency is permanent. This has been the prevailing attitude for decades, even dating back one hundred years.
This is why the Trump administration has been such a shock to the system, and why they have faced more than one hundred legal challenges to their actions. To put a fine point on it, the Trump administration is the first in our lifetimes, even dating back to our parents’ parents, to believe that the voters should get their way over the administrative state.
The people who now head the health bureaucracies of HHS, CDC, NIH, and FDA, have a special obligation to enact dramatic reform. They worked on this for many weeks prior to the big day. They did this not for money or fame or professional advancement but simply because they believe in doing what is right. As a result, they have turned away 10-20 thousand employees, a move without precedent in the modern history of government.
This should be inspiring to all of us. But, as we’ve learned, doing the right thing is a thankless task. I’ve seen little or no praise for the people who put all this in motion and carried out the great task. They deserve our every congratulation and every prayer for their well-being because they are now facing the challenge of their lives, as the legacy media calls them every name and as they face down some of the most powerful interest groups in the world.
Keep these heroes in your thoughts. These are hard times for them. Cutting government and granting liberty to the people is apparently a thankless task. But they are doing the Lord’s work and need every support we can give.
