George W. Bush is entering the final phase of his presidency, a time when many modern presidents begin to think about what they have achieved as leader of the United States, to think about their ‘legacy.’
Legacy is most commonly described as something left behind by one generation to the next. Sometimes legacy refers to something that was done that will provide benefits for years to come. (Social Security. Medicare.) Other times legacy can define a course of action or policies that achieved a specific goal. (Defeating Communism. The Interstate Highway System.) In most cases though, legacies refer to the good things accomplished under a president’s watch. Sometimes they do not. (Watergate. Vietnam. )
What will be the lagacy of George W. Bush? Will it be the disasterous war in Iraq? The mangling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe? Or maybe it will be the systematic gutting of the Federal government.
Bush has done little in the way of making life better for average Americans, but it would be a mistake to believe that his actions are due to incompetance. In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true. In his push to privatize government and position party loyalists and all around hacks into positions of power, one of the greatest and longest lasting legacies bestowed upon us and future Americans will be the destruction of our federal government’s “nuts and bolts.”
In a recent article in The Nation, Dan Zegart examines the purposeful decimation of the federal government through the appointment of political cronies to government agencies who have no knowledge of the mandates of those agencies, or at worst, are determined to dismantle generations of government regulations that had once made American products and consumers among the safest in the world.
“…what is actually happening is more complex and far-reaching than mere brain drain. More accurately, the executive branch is undergoing a brain transplant. An entire culture of civil service professionals loyal to their agency’s mission is being systematically replaced with a conservative cadre accountable to the White House. While every President appoints his own “politicals” to run the departments, the Bush team has broken new ground, attempting to realign the executive branch permanently by junking a 100-year-old system of merit-based hiring for career bureaucrats.
While the embedding of politicals in career jobs did not originate with Bush, the scale and coordination with which it is being done under this Administration seem unprecedented, according to more than fifty current and former government officials interviewed during an eight-month-long Nation investigation. “They’ve put people in charge of many offices who simply don’t believe in the mission of the office,” said William Yeomans, a twenty-four-year veteran of the Justice Department’s civil rights division who quit last year after being inexplicably transferred to the criminal unit. “And they are there to insure that those offices will never return to carrying out the policies or enforcing the law in the way that they used to. And they’re going to do that by changing the people who are in the bureaucracy.”
The Bush practice of appointing political loyalists to positions of power is bad enough. That most of those appointees come from industries diametrically opposed to the mission of the agencies they are given control of is another altogether. From the FDA to the EPA to the DOJ, career employees, who have not only the experience but the know how to navigate an already complex bureaucracy, are being given the ax, either through transfers or demotions or by making their workplaces so hostile that they leave on their own. The result is an emasculated federal agency, bent on not performing it’s mission, so that Bush et.al. can ‘prove’ their claim that government is ineffective. Just look no farther than FEMA, Brown, and Hurricane Katrina to see the results of this practice. This may be among the most extreme examples, but it is classic Bush policy and it is being duplicated all over the place at the federal level.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that our federal government is over-bloated and has a ton of waste. But gutting the programs or agencies isn’t the way to reform a system gone astray. Unless of course that is your prime goal.
It is said that the future is in the hands of those who teach the children. The political correlation would be that the future is in the hands of those who stock the bureaucracy. Bush will be gone in 2008, at least in the sense of being head of our government. But one domestic legacy he created will live on for generations, and sadly, it’s nothing to be proud of. For this particular legacy will have no good effects, only negative ones.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Bush, Democracy, Government, Politics.
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November 22nd, 2006 at 2:42 am
Well, I suppose you could look at it that way. Or you could figure that, in total, little was done either way to shrink the incredibly bloated unConstitutional Federal Gov’t. From the Dept of Education to the FDA, from the labor laws to the minimum wage, it all should go. The Feds should stick to foreign policy, defense, and possibly interstate roads. All else should be left to the states and the people, like the Constitution says.
Bush is a jr Socialist. The near-Communists now have ‘control’ of the House and Senate, for whatever that’s worth. I’ve long since given up hope for a sensible restructuring of the US. I’ll settle for some kind of defense of my children’s lives against the threat of violent Muslims. In a bumbling, well-meaning sort of way, GWB has at least tried to do something about them. Not nearly the response I would have hoped for, of course, but at least better than endless yakking in the UN while Saddam gives bioweapons to AQ.
We’re wussified, that’s all there is to it. We can’t seem to stand a historically low level of casualties in what should be considered the equivalent of a little light colonial policing. What will we do when they manage to get a nuke into Manhattan? Will we finally have the will to declare war on every nation that allows its citizens to teach their children that America is the Great Satan (and, yes, I include our ‘buddies’ the Saudis in this; one can accuse Bush of being buddy-buddy with them, I suppose, but I rather suspect that Conyers and his ilk would be no better).
O well; I have some hope. Demographics is destiny, after all. Those who are willing to actually defend this nation, and who are less likely to view with approval the Feds having a hand in everything, are reproducing at a favorable rate compared to folks who view abortion as a woman’s ‘right’, homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle choice, and the world as overpopulated and warming dangerously. It’s tough to reproduce when you abort many of your offspring, are in a ‘same-sex’ relationship, or have one designer baby at 39. I have 4 children, and am likely to have more than double that in grandchildren. Having homeschooled them, they have not been brainwashed into thinking that America and Christianity are evil, Islam is a religion of peace, and guns are baaad. So I suspect my views will be disproportionately represented in the next few generations. Just think of it as evolution in action. Survival of the fittest. Last man standing.
November 30th, 2006 at 3:19 am
You make some wildly inaccurate claims. Actually, both the economy and housing market boomed under Bush’s watch, so you’re wrong when you say average Americans haven’t prospered over the last six years. Look around, man. People are thriving. If you really hate Bush so much, at least correctly assess his record. Not only that. You ought to learn to spell — start with “disastrous” for one, though there are more misspellings in your post. And you’re running for Congress, geez!
Burkean Reflections