"The unfortunate decision to evacuate infected people to this country, against President Trump’s explicit wishes, provided the media with the opportunity to combine its attacks on Trump with the coverage of the coronavirus for ratings gold."

Daniel Greenfield writes in part in FrontPage Magazine,

President Trump had been told that nobody with the coronavirus would be flown to America.

The State Department decided to do it anyway without telling him and only made the announcement shortly after the planes landed in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, as unfriendly an outlet to the administration as there is, "Trump has since had several calls with top White House officials to say he should have been told, that it should have been his decision and that he did not agree with the decision that was made."

Who in the State Department actually made the decision? That’s a very good question.

...Dr. William Walters is still on duty. In 2017, Walters was boasting of prepping more Ebola evacuations even over President Trump’s opposition to the practice. And he was once again at the wheel now.

“The question was simply this: Are these evacuees?” Walters explained the decision to evacuate coronavirus patients to the United States. “And do we follow our protocol? And the answer to that was yes on both accounts.”

Consulting President Trump was not part of the protocol even on a major national security issue.

In a Congressional briefing, Walters boasted that, “the Department executed the largest non-military evacuation of U.S. citizens in its history. The safe and efficient evacuation of 1,174 people from Wuhan, China and people onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan is a testament to the agility, proficiency, and dedication of our workforce to accomplishing our core mission – advancing the interests of the American people.”

And the triumph of the administrative state and its bureaucratic protocols over the President.

At a State Department briefing, Walters stated that, “The chief of mission, right, through the U.S. embassy, is ultimately the head of all executive branch activities.”

That is the problem. Right there.

Walters got his job in 2011. He’s a relic of the Obama era. That doesn’t mean that his politics are those of his former boss. But this is not about him. It’s about the reality that the White House doesn’t make many of the most vital decisions and doesn’t even know that they’re being made until it’s too late.

And what that means, beyond the politics of the moment, is that the people don’t decide.

You can vote one way or another and the real decisions that matter will still be made by the head of a directorate that is a subsection of a bureau that you never heard of, but that has a budget in the hundreds of millions, a small army as its disposal, and will follow whatever the protocol is.

This is how the country is really run. And that’s the problem.

The underlying problem with our government is that it’s too big to control. Voting in an election or even sitting in the Oval Office doesn’t mean you’re in charge. The problem goes beyond the current obsession with the Deep State. The real issue has always been the Deep Industry or the administrative state.

If the coronavirus becomes a critical problem in this country, the blame will go back to an obscure arm of the State Department, but it will never be placed there. Whatever happens a year from now, no one outside a small professional class will have ever heard of the Directorate of Operational Medicine.

The media will spend all its time bashing President Trump, Pence, assorted cabinet members, and perhaps the CDC, without ever drilling down to the facts, even though it has them at hand. The media’s rule of thumb is that natural disasters and disease outbreaks are always successfully managed by Democrats and mismanaged by Republicans. Katrina and Maria were disasters, but Sandy was a success story. The coronavirus is a catastrophe, but the Ebola virus was brilliantly handed by smart people who are handling the coronavirus response. But it’s different because the guy in the White House is.

The truth is that all of these were mismanaged by the same agencies, many of the same people, and by a government infrastructure that excels at drawing up big budget proposals, but is inept at solving problems when they actually emerge, and just follow whatever protocols will cover its collective asses.

All the rest is a matter of the uncontrollable, the innate qualities of the storm or the disease, and the story that the media chooses to tell about the disaster in the service of its political agenda.

Even during the dying days of impeachment, the media was forced to realize that there was more interest in the coronavirus than there was in its attacks on Trump. The unfortunate decision to evacuate infected people to this country, against President Trump’s explicit wishes, provided the media with the opportunity to combine its attacks on Trump with the coverage of the coronavirus for ratings gold.

And if the stock market goes on falling, and the economy declines, it can even pull off a narrative coup.

Just as after Katrina and Maria, watch for the outpouring of lies, the claims that New Orleans had reverted to cannibalism and that everyone in Puerto Rico was dead, will be matched and exceeded.

There will be a cure for the coronavirus. But there’s no cure for the spread of viral fake news.

There is however a cure for the decisions that led to a coronavirus problem in the United States.

It’s called the Constitution.

America was meant to have a small government under the control of the people, not the bureaucrats. The real disease is bigger than the coronavirus. It’s a fatal illness called big government. Unlike the coronavirus, it has a total mortality rate. No society that has succumbed to it has ever survived.

Read more here.

"Whoever sent those workers to handle possibly infected Americans without proper training or protective gear and then allowed them to go their way and mingle with the general population needs to be fired."

In PJ Media, Rick Moran reports in part,

A whistleblower has filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of the Special Counsel alleging that Health and Human Services Department officials sent workers to process evacuees from Wuhan, China, without proper training or protective gear.

Wuhan is the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.

The whistleblower also alleges that HHS dismissed her concerns and she was threatened with the loss of her job if she didn't accept reassignment.

Fox News:

"We are hopeful that Congress and the OSC [the U.S. Office of the Special Counsel] will investigate this case in a timely and comprehensive manner," the whistleblower's attorney, Lauren Naylor, told Fox News, adding that the team could not provide a public copy of the complaint. "This matter concerns HHS’s response to the coronavirus, and its failure to protect its employees and potentially the public. The retaliatory efforts to intimidate and silence our client must be opposed."
The American evacuees were in quarantine at the time, but the workers who were potentially exposed to the virus were allowed to interact with the public. Did HHS violate its own protocols? Did HHS have any protocols in place?

Politico:

The complaint alleges that teams from HHS’ Administration for Children and Families were deployed to air force bases from Jan. 28-31 and Feb. 2-7 to receive Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China — the center of the virus outbreak — and that HHS officials broke protocol and ignored concerns about coronavirus exposure in the process.
The whistleblower also says that the workers were not consistently tested for the virus after being exposed. This is the sort of stupidity that leads to epidemics.

An HHS spokesperson said whistleblower complaints are taken very seriously, and that the department is “providing the complainant all appropriate protections under the Whistleblower Protection Act. We are evaluating the complaint and have nothing further to add at this time.”

Two people with knowledge of the situation told POLITICO the whistleblower’s claims were accurate.

Naturally, Democrats pounced.

Reports of the complaint outraged some on Capitol Hill, and at least one lawmaker, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), called on HHS Secretary Alex Azar to resign Thursday night.

“Allowing HHS workers to be exposed to Wuhan evacuees without adequate protection is gross mismanagement that jeopardizes American lives,” Markey wrote on Twitter. “We need someone in charge who will rise to the level of responding to this threat.”

Some small-minded stupid bureaucrat goofs up and then panics when his monumental errors are pointed out to him, threatening to fire the underling who tried to do the right thing. Except, in this case, we're not talking about a paperwork snafu or even malfeasance. This is out and out stupidity. Whoever sent those workers to handle possibly infected Americans without proper training or protective gear and then allowed them to go their way and mingle with the general population needs to be fired.

"The vast federal bureaucracy that Trump is struggling to operate is the real government of America."

The Zman writes,

...democracy inevitably leads to some form of authoritarian rule, based in the urban areas. That’s where we are now in modern America. The illusion of democracy has disguised the deep contempt the ruling elite has for the people, but that contempt is becoming more obvious. At some point, they will simply stop pretending.

...This collapse of legitimacy results in a Congress that does very little. Instead, it relies on the Executive to do what it asks. The vast federal bureaucracy that Trump is struggling to operate is the real government of America. The FBI sedition scandal is a good example of the contempt with which the New Class holds the political class. They have no fear of either party in Congress, as they know they are powerless. Proof of that is the parade of people lying to Congress and never facing the consequences.

...What we have today is rule by a surprisingly small number of people. At the top is the global pirate class that owns the media, technology and finance. Under them are the lesser elites that rule over the academy, mass media, politics and foreign policy. This is the New Class, an elite within the bureaucracy that has a free hand in running the state, as long as they don’t anger their paymasters. At most there are a few thousand people controlling a few million person bureaucracy that runs the global empire.

Read more here.

"Consolidate and shut down departments"?

At The Federalist, Ned Ryun writes,

...It’s time for Republicans to have a reality check: do you really think that fewer than 5,000 appointees can win against 2.8 million federal government employees who have a vested interest in absolutely nothing changing? Maybe, if an administration had 20 years, but it doesn’t. It has four, maybe if they’re lucky eight, years, and as history has shown us, the odds of any party getting three straight terms of a single party in the White House are fairly slim. We have already seen bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Justice, and State Department not only promise, but also begin to resist any reforms from the Trump administration.

...All government employees, which numbered nearly 4 million in 1939, number over 22 million today, with nearly three million federal employees and the rest state and local (and that excludes military).

But it’s worse than simply having millions of federal government employees trying to outlast a Republican administration. The overwhelming majority of those federal employees who donated to a presidential campaign, more than 95 percent, gave money to Hillary Clinton. Ninety-nine percent of contributions from State Department employees went to Clinton in the 2016 elections. You can be sure they aren’t excited to be working for Trump.

So my advice to President Trump is this: don’t play the game by the current rules. Change the rules by which the game is played. It’s time to cut the leviathan of government down to size. Trump’s hiring freeze is a good step in the right direction. It stops one of the reinforcing loops. But he needs to reverse the loop and cut the federal workforce by no less than 25 percent in four years. Trump should then consolidate and shut down departments.

...Philosophical changes take time. Structural changes can spur those, and Trump can put his mark on American history by truly changing the rules by which the game is played. The administration and Republicans in power must see the pitfalls previous administrations failed to avoid. Those administrations decided government really wasn’t so bad once they got the reins, and if we’re not careful, the swamp might start to seem like a hot tub.

...President Trump and the GOP have a chance to conserve the original principles of the country, that government is limited to protect the rights of the people, not provide them everything they want or need. If Trump can change the rules, he’ll change history.

Read more here.

h/t CBD

Fatter, sicker peasants

Mark Steyn writes,

What does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps... The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you're wondering why every Big Government program assumes you're a feeble child, that's because a citizenry without "work and purpose" is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn't just be "economic inequality", but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.

Read more here.

Victimhood isn't the only response

In his USA Today column Glenn Reynolds writes about the actions of three American young men on the high speed train in Europe:

The purpose of terror is to terrorize. But responding appropriately has the opposite effect. The response of British businessman Chris Norman, who helped subdue the attacker, illustrates this: “Norman said his first reaction was to hide," The Fiscal Times reported. "But after he saw the Americans fighting the attacker, he said he went to help them.”

Fear is contagious. But so is courage. People should respond not like a herd of sheep but like a pack of wolves. When the follow-up report on the 2001 attacks came out, J.B. Schramm noted in The Washington Post that "on Sept. 11, 2001, American citizens saved the government, not the other way around.” Intelligence agencies failed. Air defense systems failed. But: “Requiring less time than it took the White House to gather intelligence and issue an attack order (which was in fact not acted on), American citizens gathered information from national media and relayed that information to citizens aboard the flight, who organized themselves and effectively carried out a counterattack against the terrorists, foiling their plans. Armed with television and cellphones, quick-thinking, courageous citizens who were fed information by loved ones probably saved the White House or Congress from devastation.”

Nonetheless, when the government reacted, the money went into enriching and strengthening those bureaucracies instead of, as Schramm urged, educating and training American citizens. Perhaps this latest incident will serve as a reminder that there is another way. At the very least, it should remind citizens that while you can’t rely on the government to be everywhere you are, you yourself are always there.

Read more here.

Henry Kissinger saves me from a day at the bureaucracy

I had the day off today, so I decided to renew my license plates. When my number was called, I was informed that I needed to get an emissions test. The last time I got my license plates renewed I was living on the plains in rural Colorado, where the politicians do not require emissions testing. Now I am in the affluent suburb south of Denver, where no one wants to be politically incorrect.

Knowing that these operations were run by the government, which has no competition, I decided to stop by the house and get a book to read from my shelf full of books I had purchased at used book sales, but had never read. I picked Henry Kissinger's White House Years.

Sure enough, the lines at the emission testing station were around the block. I got so engrossed in reading Kissinger's book, that several times I neglected to move my car forward when the line was moving. Later, when I went across town to get my license, I was number 574 in line, I kid you not! The time went fast, as I read about how Kissinger was a loyal friend and admirer of Nelson Rockefeller, and was shocked when Nixon asked him to be his adviser.

Writing this book in 1979, Kissinger writes candidly about Rockefeller and Nixon. Some of his observations about the process of electing politicians are even more true today than they were in the 1970s:

A man who understands the complex essence of the nominating process, as Nixon did supremely, will inevitably defeat a candidate who seeks the goal by emphasizing substance.

Obama v. Romney anyone? One more:

The politics of manipulation may yet be the essence of modern American Presidential politics.

"It wasn't a secret at all."

The V.A.'s practice of zeroing out appointments and substituting new dates was standard practice, David A. Fahrenthold writes:

One great test of any bureaucracy is whether it can effectively deliver bad news to the top of its chain of command.

In recent years, the VA health system started to fail that test.

In some cases, local officials’ bonuses depended on the numbers looking good. So, at some point years ago, they began asking clerks to change the numbers — with practices like “zeroing it out.” Cheating was made easier by the VA’s ancient computer systems, designed decades ago.

“They would say, ‘Change the “desired date” to the date of the appointment,’ ” said one employee knowledgeable about scheduling practices at a VA medical center. The employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, decided to go along with those requests. Fighting the order to lie wasn’t worth it.

This week, federal auditors provided stark evidence of the problem that VA’s leaders had missed. The auditors had studied 226 veterans who got appointments at the VA medical center in Phoenix. The official data showed they waited an average of 24 days for an appointment. In reality, the average wait was 115 days.

Now, VA’s leaders have been faced with a startling failure. The bureaucracy below them wasn’t telling them the truth about wait times. The numbers system they set up to go around the bureaucracy wasn’t, either.

The only answer, now, has been to send people out to VA clinics to talk to schedulers, face to face. Before the auditors went out, they were warned they might hear evidence that clerks had been cheating the system.

“If this occurs, remain calm,” the VA counseled auditors in a memo. It suggested follow-up questions. “Have you brought this to anyone’s attention? If needed, follow up with: What has been the response?”

Read more here.

Confused?

What would you do if you saw this sign? Here is a 159 word explanation of what the 6 word sign means.

2013: few new laws, but lots of new regulations

Paul Bedard writes that federal agencies issued a whopping 3,659 rules and regulations in 2013.

Only 65 public laws were signed by President Obama in 2013, meaning that his government issued an average of 56 new regulations for every one, a record high ratio, according to the annual analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.