When the outgoing Republican Congress failed to enact
appropriations bills for the fiscal year that began October 1, all
of their difficult spending decisions were left squarely on the
shoulders of the new Democratic majority. Journalists and their
sources invoked apt metaphors of sabotage. As David Rogers of
The Wall Street Journal wrote: "Like a retreating army,
Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative
land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take
power in Congress next month."
Rogers might just as well have been describing the entirety of
what conservatives have been doing to both the executive and
legislative branches of government for the past six years. It is
crucial to understand that it’s not merely Republicans’ incompetence
or political pandering that has left the government in shambles.
Rather, many of their acts of sabotage were premeditated, often
hatched in right-wing think tanks. The central if unstated mission
of those idea factories, and their leading funders, is to weaken the
public sector in order to minimize its capacity to tax and regulate
the private sector. But because the general public doesn't actually
share conservatism's deep hostility toward government, their most
effective tactics rely on subterfuge and operate in ways that can't
be easily detected.
As we all know, the two most damaging actions on the conservative
Republican watch -- the Iraq invasion and the huge tax cuts for the
rich -- together will saddle future administrations and Congresses
with large budget shortfalls, long-term burdens on the economy
generally, a depleted military and diminished international
credibility. Both of those ideas were heartily endorsed by movement
conservatives years before Bush took office. While they were carried
out in the full light of day, the rationales provided for both
relied on sheer mendacity. In the case of the tax cuts, the same
bogus justifications that failed to come to pass during the Reagan
era -- supply-side shibboleths, purported financial benefits for
average Americans, a supposed streamlined budget -- were trotted out
again to provide cover for the right's actual agenda: paying off
wealthy contributors while burying the war-preoccupied government
under heaps of debt.
Those are the blockbuster efforts. The real artfulness of the
conservative movement's attacks on government, though, can be seen
in subtler approaches that work like termite infestations.
One example is "smart regulation," a term the right ingeniously
co-opted from the Clinton administration. Conservatives redefined it
to mean, in practice, pretending to write and enforce regulations
while doing nothing of the kind. Agencies responsible for
implementing environmental and public health and safety laws have
basically downshifted to idle under Bush. For example, OMB Watch
compared the productivity of four important regulatory agencies --
the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug
Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
and the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration --
in George W. Bush's first term with the agencies' performance under
his predecessors. Looking back, those agencies approved 74
"economically significant" rules under George H.W. Bush, 55 for the
first Bill Clinton term, and 51 for the second. In George W. Bush's
first term, just 25 significant rules emerged from those agencies.
For the EPA alone, the major regulatory output dropped from 40 in
the first Clinton term to 11 under Bush. That passivity has created
an enormous backlog for future administrations to deal with.
John Graham, a hero of the conservative movement who ran the
Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in Bush's Office of
Management and Budget from 2001 to March 2006, instituted a wide
assortment of administrative innovations all designed to further
slow down and complicate the process of issuing regulations. Under
the Data Quality Act of 2000, which two conservative legislators
snuck into a huge appropriations bill in the waning days of the
Clinton administration, Graham imposed a mind-bogglingly cumbersome
set of new guidelines that enable regulated companies to challenge
any data disseminated by agencies throughout every stage of their
rule-making processes -- not just after proposed regulations are
published. His rules also required the agencies to respond to those
outside challenges along the way, and for OMB to become involved in
disagreements, threatening to further bog down the already painfully
slow regulatory process. Moreover, outside "peer review" would be
required of "highly influential scientific assessments" -- those
that could lead to rules having a financial impact of more than $500
million a year -- or if "the dissemination is novel, controversial,
or precedent-setting, or has significant interagency interest." In
other words, peer review will be imposed whenever OMB sees fit to
impose it. It is unlikely that those paralyzing rules will be
dropped even after the Bush team finally hangs it up, as regulated
companies that contribute abundantly to political campaigns have a
huge stake in sustaining them. (Thomas O. McGarity, Sidney Shapiro,
and David Bollier wrote a book about the conservative movement's
regulatory approach titled, appropriately enough: Sophisticated Sabotage: The
Intellectual Games Used to Subvert Responsible Regulation.)
Another example is the politicization of federal agencies. Around
the time of Bush's inaugural in 2001, the Heritage Foundation
produced a number of op-eds and reports urging him to rely heavily
on political appointees so that he could better assert control over
a "bulky, balky bureaucracy." The more individuals running
government agencies who share the mindset of those who work at
Heritage, the more readily they would be able to impose the
conservative agenda -- including diminished enforcement of
environmental, health, and safety regulations. And, sure enough, the
Bush administration followed Heritage's advice. Princeton University
political scientist David E. Lewis, reviewing data from the Office
of Personnel Management, found that the number of political
appointments escalated during the first term of the Bush
administration after declining substantially during Clinton's eight
years. From 1992 to 2000, political appointees in the federal
government dropped by nearly 17 percent -- from 3,423 to 2,845. From
2000 to 2004, that figure climbed back up by 12.5 percent to 3,202.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is a poster child for the
damage that excessive politicization can cause at the hands of
conservatives hostile to government. Under the successful management
of James Lee Witt during the Clinton administration, FEMA
transformed from a turkey farm for cronies into an effective agency
widely praised by both Democrats and Republicans. Witt's unqualified
successors, Joseph Allbaugh and Michael "Brownie" Brown, relied
heavily on other politically appointed ideologues as the agency
deteriorated to the level of ineptitude that Americans witnessed in
horror after Hurricane Katrina. Similar politicization is pervasive
throughout the executive branch, with comparably harmful long-term
consequences for effective governance.
Other ideologically impelled acts of sabotage include negligible
oversight of private sector government contracts, which has produced
far more of the waste, fraud, and abuse that conservatives
habitually deride than preceding administrations; legislated time
bombs set to go off in future years in the Medicare drug bill, the
No Child Left Behind Act, and various tax cutting laws, all of which
will put future Congresses in political traps that will compound the
difficultly of governing sensibly; and abundant secrecy, which will
lead to the discovery down the road of untold abuses that will only
further undermine political support for government.
The new Democratic Congress needs to shine a bright light on the
planning and execution of all these insidious tactics, to help the
public connect the dots linking the right's ideology to the
government's myriad failures since 2001. Preventing future attacks
and beginning the reconstruction process will require widespread
recognition that the enemy isn't just a band of renegade
incompetents -- it's movement conservatism itself.
Greg Anrig Jr., vice president of programs at The Century
Foundation, is author of the forthcoming book The Conservatives
Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing (John Wiley
& Sons).