Government By Emergency...

From 9/11 to COVID, Every Emergency Means Bigger Government

PETER SUDERMAN

For two decades, Americans have been governed by emergency. These emergencies have become excuses for permanent political power grabs, for restrictions on individual liberties large and small, for mass bureaucratization and mass expansion of government spending, trillions of dollars' worth of non-solutions to deep-rooted problems. With every crisis, government grows. And now the crisis is government itself. 

What did Congress do in response to a threat that exploited America's bureaucratic obesity and dysfunction? It created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a super-bureaucracy charged with organizing a gaggle of other bureaucracies, many of which had little or nothing to do with each other. The solution Congress proposed to the problem of too much bureaucracy and too little bureaucratic coordination was even more bureaucracy, at a higher level. And of course, it hasn't worked; DHS has been plagued by serious management and morale problems, by coordination issues stemming from the large portfolio of unrelated subagencies it oversees, and by wasteful spending. Terrorism, meanwhile, remains a real threat. It didn't solve the problem. It became the problem. And government grew and grew along the way. 

The DHS was not the only federal byproduct of 9/11. Congress also created the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which proceeded to spend years harassing flyers who pose no threat, installing invasive scanners that nonetheless miss bombs shaped like pancakes, molesting children while failing to catch guns and bombs, and demanding that grandmothers strip off belts and shoes in exchange for the privilege of going from one place to another. In response to a genuine threat, Americans were treated to a new federal agency dedicated to mass groping. The emergency justified it.

The emergency also justified two new wars, one of which we're still fighting today, and thousands upon thousands of casualties, not to mention more than a trillion dollars in spending to fund the war effort. 

No one is safer because of these wars; if anything, the opposite is true. But they have helped fuel a bigger, more powerful federal government, one that is more costly, more intrusive, more bureaucratized, operating on a permanent emergency footing, despite doing little or nothing to solve the underlying issue. 

More...