In a watershed announcement, Google (which owns YouTube) admitted to using heavy-handed censorship under pressure from government. The target was supposed misinformation about elections, the COVID-19 pandemic, and vaccines. In practice, this meant the throttling of a majority of opinions in this country and the deletion of millions of videos.
Every public figure or writer who dissented from regime priorities can tell stories. I’ve had about 50 to 75 video interviews deleted. At some point, I began to warn any program that hosted me that the video would likely be removed no matter what I said. It became obvious in my case that it was not just the content; it was personal.
The same happened with Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and pretty much everything else. Parler was an alternative social media platform, but it was taken down by Amazon Web Services and its app deleted from all the stores.
All this developed at the same time that civil liberties were under fire. Millions of small businesses were closed in the name of public health. The schools and churches were closed. People were forced to wear masks. For a time, there were restrictions on travel between states. Later, people were told to choose between their medical freedom and their jobs.
Who was running the show? It was not the elected politicians. It was the unelected layer of the state that long inhabited the agencies, permanent staff who work with a long to-do list every day. They have all the institutional knowledge. They ignore the comings and goings of presidents and parties. This is the immortal portion of the state.
There are many layers to this administrative state. It has the civilian layer, the military layer, the industrial layer, and the elusive intelligence layer, which might be the most impenetrable and least transparent. All are structured for permanence. The media pays almost no attention to them except to permit the agencies with hands-on knowledge to script their stories.
Voters had previously mostly been unaware, thinking that the real problem was politicians and lobbyists, not civil servants at all levels and their retail branches in regulated industries.
Seemingly out of nowhere, these nameless people divided us between essential and nonessential, they told us how many people we could have for dinner, whether our kids could socialize with others, if we could hold weddings and funerals, and whether we could even enter homes for the elderly, for which the family is paying.
Something had to change. That much was obvious. Donald Trump was elected president again. Thus began the greatest experiment of our lives. The goal is to restrain, contain, and thwart his enemies. The larger effort has been to unravel and uproot the administrative state.
How does this work? One might suppose that the answer is simple. Get rid of it with dramatic cuts. This was the hope of the Department of Government Efficiency. It had planned to use algorithms to ax employees and budget lines, even abolish whole agencies.
This partially worked in some areas. But in other ones, the result was disaster. The reason is that these agencies are so entangled with industry and academia that grave damage can come from reckless slicing and dicing.
As just one example, let’s say that we want to end gain-of-function research in biotech and military affairs. It’s not enough just to announce that to one agency and be done with it. It involves many agencies, many moving parts all over the world, at many levels. There are labs to downshift and shut down, and doing so without care and scrupulous scientific attention is deeply dangerous. Firing the people who are most knowledgeable would be a disaster.
Some version of the same pervades the entirety of the bureaucracy, which maintains payment systems, owns property and financial liabilities, and maintains contracts that cannot be legally ended. The relationship of the agencies with industry is extremely tight, and wrecking one sector could wreck both. As much as I might fantasize about pushing a button to end it all, that is not on the list of options.
Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, is on the front line of this great experiment in reform. He decided early on that it was not enough just to cut. Cuts can be reversed by a future administration. What he has sought to do is change the culture of science itself, and in a way that affects academia, publishing, laboratory work, education and training, priorities, and much more. He wants to restore traditional science, which means reproducibility, empiricism, humility, methods of the past, and more. His goal is to save real science from politics for the long term.
Every agency head faces the same troubling problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a gigantic mess, as everyone knows, but its influence is still there. Reforming it remains one of the greatest challenges. The Department of Agriculture is involved in every aspect of farming and food supply. Its influence needs to go away according to some plan that does not disrupt the food supply. It’s true in energy, the military, labor, education, and every other area.
There is no question about the goal: restore the freedom of the American people and remove the grip of an administrative state that doesn’t even exist in the Constitution. What’s in dispute is the method to get from here to there within the frame of electoral politics. You need to go fast but not rush, be thorough but not incautious, sweeping but not in a way that destabilizes life for people. This is not an easy task.
You see, we are in uncharted territory insofar as reform efforts go. Nothing on this scale has ever been attempted in an advanced industrialized democracy before. Never. We have a long record of reform efforts—some good and some disastrous—in totalitarian regimes and monarchies of old. We have no record of such attempts in modernized societies that revere the plebiscite.
Complicating matters are the troubling patterns taking place within technology, with the radical commodification of data and the aggressive rise of AI. What we certainly do not want is to smash the state and leave something even worse: a hegemon of data scrapers building a surveillance state that is motivated by profit and therefore more efficient. We might find ourselves thinking back ruefully on the days of a bloated but inefficient and lumbering bureaucracy that is easily outsmarted by people in their private lives.
There is the political problem, too. We need a president strong enough to control the executive state but not strong enough to become a despot. There are political dangers, too, of emboldening the opposition or crashing the economy in ways that bring the old regime back to power. Dealing with market and public relations is a constant concern, not to mention leaks and bad actors within the state apparatus.
There are dangers of moving too slowly, thinking too superficially, and not anticipating unintended consequences. Intelligently managed, this is a tremendous opportunity for the restoration of genuine freedom that the American experiment in people’s government always promised. If it works here, the example will be copied around the world.
In some ways, then, these are great and exciting times to be alive. The ground is shifting beneath our feet. We are moving from one paradigm to another. We know that where we’ve been is intolerable. The only question is whether we can get to where we want to go while minimizing social and economic wreckage along the way.
All hail the reformers. And Godspeed!
