The Shallow, Centralized American State

A key trend underlying the Trump administration's second term.

top down centralized

The Trump administration’s attempt to exercise direct political control over all federal grant-making reveals some trends that go beyond that particular initiative. They include:

• A rejection of any independent source of technical or professional expertise;

• The vesting of decision-making authority entirely in political appointees regardless of their knowledge of the policy issue in question;

• The elimination of any countervailing constraint or check on centralized decision-making among inner-circle appointees.

Want some more examples? You know you do!

Consider this New York Times story by Devlin Barrett, William K. Rashbaum and Julian E. Barnes about the administration’s attempt to centralize all foreign espionage targets within a single master list:

The Trump administration is demanding that American intelligence officials turn over the names of all foreign espionage targets, including suspected spies and potential recruits, to create a master list that some officials fear will be misused or compromise operations, according to people familiar with the matter.

The effort by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has intensified in recent months, frustrating counterparts at the F.B.I. and C.I.A., who are skeptical of the claims that a master list is necessary to avoid inadvertent conflicts between agencies and to better track foreign intelligence threats in real time. The office was established in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to streamline coordination among the intelligence agencies.

Senior counterintelligence officials at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have so far resisted those demands, the people familiar with the matter said, and the effort has been mostly unsuccessful. Officials still cannot agree on the most basic details, including how a list of what are known as foreign intelligence threat actors would be created, maintained and kept secure, the people said….

For the F.B.I., such a master list of espionage targets would include those the bureau wants to investigate and perhaps someday arrest. For the C.I.A., it would include a significant number of potential assets.

Some current and former intelligence officials fear that assembling identifying details about some of the most sensitive cases may fatally compromise long-running intelligence investigations and operations. The identities of those targets are carefully protected secrets, walled off from most personnel even inside their own agencies.

This degree of centralization is hardly unique to the intelligence community. There have been a raft of stories about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attempting to manage the Pentagon in areas big and small so that it reflects what appears to be a worldview rooted in racism, resentment, and male fragility.

Or consider how the United States — scratch that, it’s just Marco Rubio — is currently running the Venezuelan state. According to the New York Times’ Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev:

In the six months since U.S. forces blew open Mr. Maduro’s bedroom door and snatched him in the dead of night, Mr. Rubio has become the de facto viceroy of Venezuela, holding sway over a sovereign nation in a way that no American official has since L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad in 2003 to run U.S.-occupied Iraq.

Mr. Rubio now effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and people close to both governments in Washington and Caracas, who provided details about his involvement in steering the country’s policies. Many spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private interactions and internal discussions.

While he has not visited Venezuela in person since the U.S. took over, the secretary of state is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations, keeping in close contact with Delcy Rodríguez, who was Mr. Maduro’s vice president and now leads her country on an acting basis, with the imprimatur of the United States. The two exchange messages in Spanish on WhatsApp, trading gossip, birthday greetings and selfies….

The direct control over Venezuela’s public revenues, in particular, distinguishes Washington’s influence there from most other countries beholden to its military and financial might.

The U.S. Treasury receives the revenue from most of Venezuela’s exports, then disburses it to Venezuela through the country’s banking system, a relationship akin to parents handing out allowances to children. Mr. Rubio and his team set the conditions on what that money can be spent on, and by whom….

When the Fox News anchor Bret Baier contacted Ms. Rodríguez about participating in an interview, she told him that Mr. Trump would have to approve. Mr. Trump loved that Ms. Rodríguez was deferring to him, and has repeatedly recounted the story to others when they ask about her, according to multiple people familiar with his comments.

These examples are entirely in keeping with a president who said in his first term that “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president” and when asked about the dearth of seasoned diplomats during his first term said, “Let me tell you, the one that matters is me. I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be.”

In theory — unitary executive theory if you want to be cute about it — there is a logic for this kind of streamlining and centralization. A populist would want government policy and government outputs to be the direct outcome of what elected officials and their political subordinates want to do. Centralizing authority and eliminating veto points on executive action enables governments to pivot more quickly towards the policy preferences of elected and appointed officials.

The problems are self-evident, however. Even if one assumes the best of intentions, disregarding professional expertise in the service of a shallow state is a recipe for making catastrophic error after catastrophic error. When Hegseth decided to do away with mandatory flu vaccines, for example, the result was the creation of human petri dishes at military bases, perfectly recreating the conditions of the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic. There are benefits to quick decisions and rapid implementation, but such an approach exacerbates the cost of bad decisions.

Furthermore, with this administration it is both impossible and ridiculous to assume the best of intentions. The assumption that the president is attempting to pursue the national interest rather than his own private interests would be absurd. Federal judges are now blasting arrangements that, “confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

And, of course, all this presumes that the president and his political appointees actually know what they are doing, when the evidence is abundantly clear that most of his appointees either have no real policy knowledge or are simply enablers of Trump’s worst instincts.

Over the longer term, the result will be akin to Trump’s declaration yesterday that he’s going to charge a toll for the Strait of Hormuz; it upends the status quo, but there is no way that what is being proposed in its stead will serve anyone’s interests but Donald Trump.