Not Ready for Prime Time

What do you get when you flood the zone with shit?

Image by Markerarts via Butt Flood Designs.

One thing to remember about Stephen Bannon's celebrated tactical principle of "flooding the zone with shit" is that, in the end, you're landed with a shit flood, which isn't what you really wanted, though that may be OK if what you really wanted was a really big fat tax cut for yourself and your billionaire clientele. Somebody else can try to take care of the backed-up sewage, if they feel like it; you're up on the higher ground of the nice neighborhood, where you hardly even smell it.

I've been thinking of 2017, when the new administration started off with a big bang of regulatory crazy, with executive orders attempting to sabotage the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act on January 20, mandating a 90-day freeze on hiring federal employees, meant to kick off a long-term reduction in the number of civil servants, on January 23, directing DHS to build a Wall of separation between Mexico and the US (they thought it might be paid for with a 20% tariff on Mexican imports) and fast-tracking environmental reviews of infrastructure projects on January 24, cutting federal funding for so-called "sanctuary cities" that did not cooperate with ICE and banning the EPA from contact with journalists on January 26, suspending the Refugee Admissions Program and barring entry to the United States for citizens of Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (not, of course, Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Qatar) on January 27, and ordering all federal agencies to eliminate two regulations for every new one they proposed on January 30 (when he also installed Thomas Homan as acting director of ICE, without bothering to try getting the Senate to confirm the nomination).

None of these initiatives had any particular consequences, of course. They were ill-conceived, badly drafted, in some cases of questionable legality, or just dumb. The idea of the hiring freeze went back to Carter and Reagan, and it was well known that it had never done any good:

In 1982, the Government Accounting Office issued a report on the impact of these freezes and found they had "little effect on Federal employment levels" and "disrupted agency operations, and in some cases, increased costs to the Government."^[4] This was because government agencies, rather than hire more contractors, had to pay overtime to existing employees, which is more expensive.^[5]

The Muslim ban was self-evidently unconstitutional, and was repeatedly shut down by the courts until the program had diminished into a purely symbolic picture of itself. Plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act foundered for four years on the fact that nobody in the administration or Congress was ever able to say what they wanted to replace it with. The Wall made no sense. The problem with infrastructure was never environmental regulation—it was congressional Republicans unwilling to spend money for the benefit of people other than their biggest donors (even though the Trump proposals always made plenty of space for privatization):

The White House needed votes in Congress to approve an infrastructure plan. In the early days of his administration, the president and GOP prioritized repealing the Affordable Care Act and implementing a large tax cut instead of an infrastructure plan. Three former senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said there was never a serious discussion at the White House of putting infrastructure at the top of the GOP’s legislative to-do list. “Paul Ryan and these guys had waited 30 years for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to cut taxes. They were not going to let that go,” one of them said.

And eventually they turned "Infrastructure Week" into the Trump administration's standing joke. Ha ha ha.

Two campaign promises Trump definitely didn't keep that first week: he was supposed to provide paperwork to authorities in Florida, Delaware, and New York showing that he had relinquished control over all his companies to a family trust, and he didn't do that, and he didn't release his taxes either, as reported on January 20 and 22 respectively.

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And now, eight years later, here we are again, with the minions Miller and Vought and whoever else busily attempting to implement the Project 2025 agenda with an extraordinarily terrible series of decrees and memoranda, things with which practically everything possible was wrong, from the order announcing that the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment now means something completely different from what it has meant for the last 160 years, as if Trump thought he had suddenly become the Supreme Court, through the firing of somewhere between 12 and 17 inspectors general (last I heard, the actual number was uncertain, and we knew for certain only that Michael Horowitz, the Justice Department IG who had discovered the only actual crime of the Russia investigators, almost invisible, in the third renewal order for the surveillance of Carter Page, was not one of them) without the required 30 days' notice with a "substantive rationale" to Congress (which Congress added to the law because in his first term Trump had fired inspectors general with no rationale at all), to the sudden halting of all US foreign aid programs (except for some food assistance and of course military aid to Israel and Egypt) and sacking or laying off (it's not clear which—"We hope this situation is temporary and you can return to your positions," said the termination letter, apologetically) of 60 senior officials and several hundred contractors for the United States Agency for International Development, for example, followed the next day by an increasing pile of exemptions to the order, apparently meant to communicate to the world that the 1974 Impoundment Control Act is no longer a law, though I don't see how the Secretary of State can do that if neither the Congress nor the Supreme Court has told them to. (Also, the major consequence of carrying it out would be to increase violence and distress in Latin America and bring on a big increase in unauthorized migration.)

And then came the sudden suspension of what the government thought might be $3 trillion in spending on "woke ideology" in the form of all federal grants and payments other than those made directly to individuals, which seemed to be freezing practically everything, including Medicaid, I guess while Elon Musk and his Dogeboys combed through the stuff looking for offensive items, on which US District Judge Loren AliKhan quickly put a temporary hold, on the grounds that the government literally didn't know what it was doing, at least not yet, and would have to find out

“The government doesn’t know the full scope of the programs that are going to be subject to the pause,” AliKhan said after pressing an attorney for the Justice Department on what programs the freeze would apply to. AliKhan is expected to consider a longer-term pause on the policy early next week.

followed by a rescission notice for the executive order from the Office of Management and Budget essentially saying, "Never mind," which seems like good news for those who favor rule of law, although press secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to insist that the policy still existed, perhaps in some metaphysical region, though the words in which it was embodied had been withdrawn:

Leavitt said the pause was directed more at Democratic priorities rather than making across-the-board cuts, and she said all agencies could make a case to the administration to keep their funding.

“If they feel that programs are necessary and in line with the president’s agenda, then the Office of Management and Budget will review those policies,” said Leavitt.

Leavitt declined to directly answer questions Tuesday about whether Medicaid funding would be affected by the order.

It didn't seem likely anybody would be able to find out how any of the agencies could find out whether they would be affected or not, or how they would be able to appeal. In the case of the foreign aid freeze programs were supposed to be able to apply for waivers, but Senator Chris Murphy said there was no waiver program to apply to. How do you rigorously implement a shitflood?

All last year some of us, I don't exclude myself, were fretting at the thought of a Trump victory bringing back the Millers and Voughts in a renewed vigor, rage refreshed by their time out of power and bureaucratic skills heightened by the work they'd done at the Heritage Foundation and elsewhere honing their plans in documents like the Project 2025 and the rumored Playbook for how it was going to be put into effect, with all the executive orders they'd be issuing on Day One prepared in advance.

It turns out that the executive orders were indeed ready for issue, but not, as they say, ready for prime time. The drafting was incompetent, at every level. The legal rationales were senseless, you couldn't tell who the orders applied to or how they were going to be carried out, and they did things practically nobody (including Republican governors and congresspersons whose constituents like their Medicaid and infrastructure grants and school systems) wanted, to the extent they could be interpreted to do anything at all. They'd been put together in the isolated silos of the post-truth community by people who, in their anxiety to suppress critical thinking, had lost whatever ability they had to criticize their own work.

They came in like 2017 cranked up to 11, with a fervent belief in their 1.5% mandate and their overwhelming cleverness, and badly misjudged the situation. It's going to be awful, especially for the first couple of years, and of course Trump will get his renewed tax cuts, but I'm really convinced that the changes are going to be less drastic and less durable than we feared. The end result of flooding the zone with shit is a shit show.