by Jacob G. Hornberger

The thing to keep in mind about bureaucracy is that it will always, without fail, come with inefficiencies, mistakes, faults, foibles, or, in the classic rightwing phrase, “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Inevitably, it also comes with measures that infringe liberty and even constitute tyranny.

Leave it to Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance to enunciate the rightwing view on bureaucracy, a view that is diametrically opposed to the libertarian view. According to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, which criticizes Vance for his “disregard for the constitutional balance of powers and the rule of law,” Vance stated in a 2021 interview: “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people.” It would be difficult to better capture the rightwing view on bureaucracy than that.

The perfect demonstration of this rightwing perspective is with respect to the Covid crisis. Every day throughout the crisis, rightwingers would exclaim, “Fauci! Fauci! Fauci!” in their articles, speeches, podcasts, interviews, and other presentations. They would complain about how Anthony Fauci was implementing destructive and tyrannical polices in his roles as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as chief medical advisor to the president.

Anthony Fauci

What was the rightwing solution to such policies? Their position was summarized by the words of J.D. Vance — fire Fauci and replace him with a rightwinger, one who would supposedly make better decisions and implement better healthcare policies than Fauci and other leftwing bureaucrats who were in charge of healthcare.

The same phenomenon occurred on the state and local level. Every day throughout the Covid crisis, the Internet was replete with rightwing articles, podcasts, and the like criticizing the lockdowns, the mask mandates, the vaccine requirements, the social-distancing requirements, and other policies and practices that violate the principles of a free society.

What was the rightwing solution to all this Covid tyranny? J.D. Vance sums it up perfectly: Fire the healthcare tyrants and replace them with rightwingers.

The thing to keep in mind about bureaucracy is that it will always, without fail, come with inefficiencies, mistakes, faults, foibles, or, in the classic rightwing phrase, “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Inevitably, it also comes with measures that infringe liberty and even constitute tyranny.

Thus, anyone can spend every day for the rest of his life pointing out the faults and failures, inefficiencies, and anti-freedom measures of both federal and state bureaucrats. That’s what was happening throughout the Covid crisis. It was never difficult for rightwingers or anyone else to come up with bad, inefficient, and tyrannical things that federal and state bureaucrats were doing as part of their anti-Covid crusade.

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