It’s well and good to inveigh against agency capture and corruption at the administrative state. It’s another matter to actually do something about it. In order to solve the problem, you have to discover how it works. And that’s not easy.
That’s because of the way these systems of regulation, administration, and redistribution are set up and evolve over decades, with countless layers of seeming oversight that are actually enablement, revolving doors of influence, deep contacts with the media, and vast flurries of fake studies that seem to affirm that the status quo is just great.
Many outsiders have tried. Cabinet officials and agency heads have come and gone for decades, while the agencies eat their reputations for three meals per day. It’s a sad thing to watch. All institutional knowledge rests with the bureaucracy and none with the reformers, meaning they fail every time.
All of this is a neglected area of study. How precisely can these bureaucracies be reformed if they are built to be unreformable? How can corruption be ended if every layer of oversight is itself corrupt? How can even the most well-intentioned reformer stand a chance against gigantic and entrenched machines of compulsion, blackmail, graft, payola, and propaganda?
Here is a case study that is starting to show some modicum of success—perhaps the first I’ve ever seen.
The problem in question is the pharmaceutical industry and the products called vaccines in particular. There are two agencies involved: the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), both of which exist under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It is well known that these are all hotbeds of quid pro quos that use science as cover.
HHS is now headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has long sworn to end agency capture and reassert authentic science that does not necessarily serve industry needs.
The CDC hosts something called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP. It is a committee filled with seemingly independent experts who are not.
The next section will bore you, but stick with it because it is significant.
Recently, the ACIP consumed all the headlines above the fold. This is because Kennedy fired the whole of the ACIP on June 9 and replaced every member. The newly reconstituted committee met and said no to some products for the first time ever. This has everyone in the industry freaked out.
Here is the structure.
The ACIP hosts a series of working groups, including the Adult Immunization Work Group, Child/Adolescent Immunization Work Group, General Recommendations Work Group, Evidence-Based Recommendations Work Group, and vaccine-specific groups (e.g., for meningococcal, RSV, or HPV vaccines).
All these work groups report directly to the ACIP and are facilitated by CDC staff, typically from the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD). The NCIRD is the CDC division responsible for managing and supporting ACIP’s operations. It houses the ACIP Secretariat, which oversees committee logistics, compliance with federal regulations (e.g., the Federal Advisory Committee Act), and charter renewals.
What’s more, the NCIRD includes a Board of Scientific Counselors, an advisory committee that provides scientific oversight and guidance to the NCIRD, which, in turn, supports the ACIP. In addition, there are several advisory committees that work with the ACIP: the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, and the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines.
We aren’t finished yet.
Each of these committees has subgroups. The Vaccine Safety Technical Subgroup has the particular responsibility of overseeing exactly what its name suggests: vaccine safety. That is of obvious concern these days in the aftermath of Operation Warp Speed, which rushed a new technology out to grapple with a respiratory virus that is notoriously resistant to control by a shot, particularly in the midst of a pandemic.
Most of these positions are unpaid, or, at least, the payment is not direct. The people serving on them gain academic plaudits and can more easily get contracts for consulting with the very companies they regulate. That’s why everyone wants to be listed. It’s a good career move even if you don’t do anything.
Let’s say you are now head of HHS. How would you begin to untangle this mess of a bureaucratic knot that somehow manages an industry worth many trillions of dollars, constitutes a predominant share of the support for network and cable news programming, and delivers shots millions of times daily to Americans?
I don’t know about you, but it seems hopeless to me.
Kennedy didn’t think so. He noted that Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff used to serve on the Vaccine Safety Technical Subgroup because he is the author of several statistical packages used to assess vaccine safety. He was kicked off the group in 2021 after he objected when Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, demanded that the shot from Johnson & Johnson be pulled from the market, leaving only mRNA shots on the market.
Martin smelled a rat, noting to colleagues that the safety signals did not affect the demographic for which the shots were intended. For that, he was fired. Adding insult to injury, he was then fired from Harvard University after authoring the Great Barrington Declaration and refusing the shot on grounds that he already had natural immunity.
In other words, he is far from being an anti-vaxxer, and his record shows that.
Now, let’s review the structure here of what we might call a deep-state machine. It has a permanent bureaucracy that believes it cannot be fired. It has an industry that is deeply involved in feeding data and research to the bureaucracy. It has a thick overlay of intellectual cover that serves for this Leviathan the same role as the priests once did for the despots of old: It provides the veneer of moral and scientific respectability.
If you read the history of public policy oppression, you find this common element to all of them. Keep in mind that such a structure exists in all parts of government as it affects communication, technology, military, labor, industrial structure, agriculture, finance, and banking. The agencies regulating them all are captured by industry in exactly this way, all with cover provided by high-end intellectuals.
It was Kennedy’s judgment to hit the ACIP first because it is arguably the most crucial to the racket and also the most vulnerable. That’s because the conflicts of interest are so blatant. They are, after all, announced on the website.
Who among them to dismiss? All of them. Anyone who complains is clearly defending the undefendable.
It was a bold decision, and now we are faced with something without precedent. The intellectual cover for the agency exists in tension and probable conflict with the agency itself. Moreover, the new chairman is the very person fired only four years ago by the subgroup that serves the committee!
Already, the ACIP has pushed back some, but there is much more to come. The first signs of a breakdown between the regime and its appointed apologists are evident. It happened because of the bunker-busting bomb aimed right at the intellectuals.
Agency capture cannot be unraveled in a day, but it can happen gradually over time with the right tactics and strategies. You have to know the structure as well as or better than the machine knows itself. In this case, the reformers have an advantage. They are smart and courageous, while the people they are overseeing are dim and cowardly.
Through such strategies, we might eventually win this one. Do that in every industry and agency, and we have ourselves a plan for genuine reform.
