There isn’t much left in this regime to shock the consumer of news.
We have grown accustomed to the daily cavalcade of assaults on American freedoms in the Federal Register; both the autocrat-in-chief and his press secretary have mainstreamed the practice of lying about virtually every issue. They attempt to take both sides of foreign policy issues within the same speech, claiming to be supporters of Israel while supporting Hamas, claiming to be opposed to the risk of nuclear war while encouraging Iranian nuclear advancement.
What is left to shock us, in such an environment?
Well, sometime Friday, January 5, the story developed that Lloyd Austin, the 70-year-old Secretary of Defense, was in intensive care, at Walter Reed Hospital, and had been for four days – without anybody notifying anyone in the regime.
In fact, not only did the Department of Defense keep his hospitalization a secret from the White House and the National Security Advisor, DoD personnel specifically lied when asked, claiming that Mr. Austin had been “working from home.”
Now, we must of course stipulate, before we go any further, that Lloyd Austin isn’t exactly a standout in his role. Like everyone else in the Biden-Harris regime, he’s been lackluster at best, dreadful at worst. He bears at least partial responsibility for many of the foreign policy and military disasters throughout this dumpster fire of a presidential term.
Austin has issued orders to the military in support of convoluted leftist redefinitions of extremism in an effort to drive Republicans out of the military. Austin implemented mandatory use of untested COVID vaccines and supervised the dismissal of servicemen who refused, even on religious grounds. Austin was in charge of the DoD when it so severely mismanaged the pullout from 2021 Afghanistan, leaving tens of billions of dollars’ worth of sensitive equipment behind, not to mention abandoning thousands of employees and allies to the Taliban. And that’s just the highlight reel of his disastrous tenure.
Even if none of these decisions were his choice, an honorable Secretary of Defense would have resigned his office and left the administration rather than agreeing to implement such positions. Lloyd Austin made them his own, implementing every leftist, anti-American decision that the Biden-Harris regime came up with.
But all his failures notwithstanding – the Secretary of Defense remains a critical element of the decision process, whenever the United States has to make a quick policy decision. Even when it’s just being the person to say the cursory “yes, of course, make it so” to an obvious question – still, he is the one to say it, the one who has to say it. And that means both the DoD and the White House have to be able to reach him at a moment’s notice.
As we go to press, this story is still developing. It is not yet known exactly who knew Lloyd Austin was in the Intensive Care Unit all this time. But this much is certain: for over three days, possibly more like four or five, neither the White House and Cabinet nor the leadership of the House and Senate were informed of his condition.
Congress is, of course, offended; they own the Constitutional responsibility of oversight over each department, and have to be able to get to any Cabinet secretary at any time, as needed.
Congressional leaders have said that heads will roll; this is simply an unacceptably irresponsible lapse. Even the press, for once, is aghast; even the mainstream media, biased though they be in favor of the standard Biden-Harris line, knows full well that they need access to Cabinet secretaries, just to do their jobs and share their administration swill with their readers and viewers.
But that’s not the main lesson of this news story.
What’s most shocking about this story is that it provides a rare look inside the minds of the bureaucrats, the people we often think of as the technocracy, or even the Deep State.
Obviously, someone at the Department of Defense knew Lloyd Austin was in the ICU at Walter Reed. Someone had to make up the lie that the man was working at home, to cover up the fact that he was suffering complications from some as-yet-unidentified elective surgery (if it was indeed elective, that’s a story in itself, as well). Some staffers, and presumably some undersecretaries, knew the truth of the situation and collaborated to keep both the whereabouts and the potentially life-threatening condition of the Secretary of Defense a secret from both his legislative and executive superiors.
Why?
Why did they think they had the right?
That’s the really interesting lesson in this story, isn’t it?
When our Constitutional government was founded in 1789, some federal departments were truly tiny. The Department of State constituted a few ambassadors reporting to Thomas Jefferson; the Department of the Treasury was primarily a few hundred Customs commissioners, collecting the import duties to fund the government. It was expected that each department would be tiny, run carefully and efficiently by its very “hands-on” cabinet secretary.
Since the 17th Amendment removed our state governments from the picture in 1913, however, the federal government has exploded in size and scope. Each department has become overstuffed with career bureaucrats, mostly protected by the Hatch Act and insulated from the political firing process.
These bureaucrats too often believe themselves immune to presidential elections; they are there until they retire, with the power to write regulations in flagrant disregard for the Constitutional or Congressional authority that originally created their positions. With Congress unwilling to devote the energy necessary to keep the bureaucracy under heel, each of our federal departments has become a self-perpetuating behemoth of its own, spreading its tentacles, continually seeding its new growth and expanding its petty dictatorship in all directions.
But they don’t admit to it.
These bureaucrats still spout the fiction, publicly at least, that they report to the Congress, the president, and the American people. Nothing could be further from the truth.
And this is what the first week of 2024 proved, to Washington watchers all around the world. The chiefs at the DoD, both Hatched and un-Hatched, didn’t feel any need to tell anyone else about their figurehead of a Secretary’s illness and indisposition.
They didn’t keep a secret as their boss was shuttling between confidential meetings across the globe, or anything similarly job-related. The man was just in a nearby hospital, sedated, with a possibly life-threatening condition, and they didn’t tell his bosses, the press, or the American people, all of whom deserve to know.
Some things are obvious. This shows their cockiness and irresponsibility; they didn’t tell a boss they don’t respect, or a press they don’t respect, or a public they don’t respect. Lots of people should be offended today.
But even more than that, this shows more clearly than anything else how independent, how rudderless, how powerful our bureaucracy thinks itself to be.
All the conservative accusations of the past half century are proven true by this one situation. We say that the bureaucracy has gotten too big for its britches, that the deep state behaves as if it’s independent of the political system and the will of the people.
And sure enough, the biggest department – the one with the guns, the one that our Founding Fathers would definitely have said was the most important one to keep under heel – doesn’t respect the concept of “civilian control” enough to even report the incapacity of its Secretary up the chain of command.
The Leviathan has indeed developed an ego that needs to be reined in, before it’s too late.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional and trade compliance consultant. A one-time Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. Read his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II, and the brand new Volume Three).
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