It's Time For a Break Up

I was on News Nation last night with my friend Leland Vittert. The format of his show is great. Rarely are there talking heads yelling at each other. It often is one-on-one with Leland as both interviewer and devil’s advocate pushing partisans on their points. It makes for good and insightful dialogue.

Prior to my segment, Leland was covering the growing problems in the federal bureaucracy — problems that are leading even some major news outlets to call for the break up of federal agencies.

In most studies of the histories of Rome, scholars marvel that as the empire fell into chaos at times, particularly in the crisis of the third century, the Roman bureaucracy continued to function. As the United States enters its crisis of the twenty-first century, the bureaucracy is one of the chief drivers of instability. The Roman bureaucracy could keep the roads paved, the aqueducts flowing, and the taxes collected. The American bureaucracy cannot keep baby formula on store shelves or planes in the air. It is time to break it up and reform it.

Let’s start with the most immediate story. NOTAM crashed and might have been hacked. The Canadian system failed too. Both the United States and Canada claim it was most likely not a hack but an equipment failure. It is a striking coincidence though that both systems failed on the same day.

Notably, Canada did not shut down its entire aviation system. In the United States, for the first time since September 11, 2001, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a nationwide ground stop. Flights in the air come fly, but no flight on the ground could take off.

NOTAM notifies airplanes of issues ahead of them. Turbulence, parachutists, anomalies, closed runways, missing planes, etc. — all the information is sent to planes. Most pilots say the system has become so riddled with useless information that much of the useful information gets missed.

The last time the FAA overhauled the system was in December of 2021, and the overhaul was to make the system gender-neutral. NOTAM went from “Notice to Airmen” to “Notice to Air Missions.” That’s it. Numerous pilots who listen to my radio show sent me texts and emails pointing out that the system was long overdue for an overhaul and gender neutrality was the best the FAA could do.

This is not the only FAA problem. There have been outages in the Florida corridor, with planes in Miami delayed significantly and outages in Jacksonville that messed up the southeastern seaboard flight pattern. The FAA, which argued 5G could disrupt planes, has been the chief disrupter of planes. It has even struggled to implement a new GPS-based system for flight travel instead of the old beacons and towers approach.

It is not just the FAA. The Washington Post is calling for the FDA to be broken up.

The FDA still can’t get baby formula back on shelves, and food inspectors with the FDA have repeatedly missed contamination issues that then spread to and poisoned consumers. The drug approval process may have been compromised, too, including with Alzheimer’s medicines. Then there are the COVID vaccine issues.

The FDA still insists you and I do not eat raw cookie dough despite the ridiculously small risk of salmonella poisoning by doing so.

The CDC has had ongoing problems dealing with disease and pandemic. The agency that insisted you and I not see our grandparents to keep COVID from spreading went through amazing hoops of logic to avoid telling gay men to avoid anal sex during the monkeypox spread. We could do two weeks to stop the spread of COVID, but two weeks of no orgies was a bridge too far for the CDC.

The CDC and FDA have, in fact, both prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion training over their core functions and competencies.

The FBI has its own struggles. It failed to properly investigate Larry Nassar. It screwed up various Trump investigations. There are too many shooters who were on the FBI radar while the FBI did nothing. The top of the organization does seem to be infested with careerist ladder climbers with partisan agendas.

Then there is the IRS, which has now had agents leak information about various individuals and entities and obstructed the non-profit applications of various groups, most notably conservative tea party groups in the Obama era, but not just them.

Our non-partisan bureaucracy has become sclerotic, unable to adapt, inflexible in needs, dogmatic in operations philosophies, and is harming people’s health and the economy. The mixed messages, contradictions, reversals, partisan agendas of some employees, elevation of woke instruction over core competencies, etc. have built up a huge amount of public distrust that has directly led to the American public losing faith in core institutions.

This should not be a partisan issue. There are clear problems, and it is time for some real reform.

We could and should start with a BRAC-style commission to investigate and make recommendations for reform to Congress. It is not about firing government employees. It is about making our bureaucracy responsible, accountable, and flexible. It is time to challenge the status quo and, perhaps, break up some agencies while getting rid of others.

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