How Trump’s “Schedule F” could have drained the swamp.
I have written extensively on inverted totalitarianism, that being the once nascent, now entrenched form of government that truly controls the levers of federal power in the United States. This behemoth has turned the USA into a “managed democracy”; a bureaucracy which cannot be held accountable by the elected representatives of the people. Sometimes called the 4th estate, this monster is also referred to as the “deep state” the civil service, or the administrative state.
Inverted totalitarianism does not have an authoritarian leader, but instead is run by a non-transparent group of bureaucrats. This unelected, invisible ruling class runs the country from within. They are easily influenced by corporate interests due to both the lure of powerful jobs after federal employment and the capture of our legislative bodies by the lobbyists serving concealed corporate interests.
One element of inverted totalitarianism is that the administrative state typically inserts stricter and stricter rules and regulations to control the populace. Not at the behest of Congress or the President, but rather by and for the interests of the administrative state itself. Power begets power. We the people are forced into compliance by an unknown and unknowable invisible ruling class, with no way to even understand who, what, or how they are forcing this compliance upon us. As if that is not bad enough, in these modern times, the globalist corporations and financial groups have come to play a larger and larger role in controlling this administrative state.
The Brownstone Institute’s Jeffery Tucker recently wrote an article about an executive order passed by Trump shortly before his departure, which would have enabled huge progress towards reigning in the power of the administrative state. This executive order would have created a federal employee category referred to as “Schedule F”.
This new employee classification system would have included federal workers in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating character,” which are “not normally subject to change as the result of a presidential transition.”
The executive order would have allowed agencies to reclassify policy jobs under a new schedule, and had proposed to give senior managers greater flexibility in hiring candidates and firing employees.
Significantly, this new executive order was one of the first to go when President Biden began his presidency.
From Brownstone:
The administrative state for the better part of a century, and really dating back to the Pendleton Act of 1883, has designed policy, made policy, structured policy, implemented policy, and interpreted policy while operating outside the control of Congress, the president, and the judiciary.
The gradual rise of this 4th branch of government – which is very much the most powerful branch – has reduced the American political process to mere theater as compared with the real activity of government, which rests with the permanent bureaucracy…
From 2020 and onward, the American people got to know this administrative state well. They ordered us to wear masks. They deployed their influence to close small businesses and churches. They limited how many people we could have in our homes. They festooned our businesses with plexiglass and told everyone to stay six-feet apart. They demanded two weeks of quarantine when crossing state borders. They decided which medical procedures were elective and non-elective. And they finally demanded compliance with vaccine mandates at the penalty of job loss.
None of this was ordered by legislation. It was all invented on the spot by the permanent staff of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We had no idea they had such power. But they do. And that same power which allowed those egregious attacks on rights and liberties also belongs to the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Homeland Security, and all the rest.
With luck, both the House and Senate will have significant turn-over in the 2022 election. This may pave the way for legislative action. It is a nice to imagine that, by 2024, Congress could pass and implement a bill that includes a provision such as “Schedule F.” This should be a permanent addition to our code of federal regulations. Of course, the uni-party, with its reliance on corporate dollars to finance their election campaigns, will be loath to pass such sweeping legislation.
If they can not pass such legislation, an executive order similar to Trump’s should be enacted as soon as a new President is inaugurated. If we wish to preserve our democracy, the administrative state cannot be allowed to continue to operate unchecked. The bureaucratic swamp is dark, deep and wide. Someone needs to drain it.
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You ignore the fact that it is the agencies, non-elected members who actually enacted this policy and this was the entire point of my argument. There was not one elected person involved in this corruption, so no lobbyist influenced the president to block himself. It was the unelected administrators, conspiring among multiple agencies, that blocked the person chosen by the people to make decisions exactly like this. This was the action of the Deep State at its most extreme point of influence from the industry exercising complete control over the will of the only elected person in the Executive branch, the president, who you assert is being controlled by lobbyists.
This is the point. The non-elected members of govt are wielding continued policy from one administration to the next. Trump’s determination to have HIS policy enforced was the point of contention that they rebelled against. It was the reason they sidelined Flynn, the reason they enacted the Russia hoax, moved to impeach using long standing govt administrators who perjured themselves in the attempt, and generated a fake pandemic to enable a fraudulent election. All of this was the action of the members of the non-elected administrative state to stop Trump still in place to affect these abuses of power against the president.
It isn’t about being able to govern alone. It is about the government serving the will of the people as indicated by the consent of the governed, the election, which chose the president as head of the Executive branch. The administrators are meant to enforce the policy of the president, but they don’t because they don’t have to do so. They have a will of their own and are unduly influenced to enact policies that benefit themselves and the industry they oversee. As a consequence there is no independent oversight of these industries, and the consistent policy from administration to administration is the consequence because they can thwart the will of the people. It is called the Deep State.
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@Reader
It is called Deep Capture, where the industry that a given agency is responsible for monitoring comes to control undue influence over that very agency. It isn’t just the fees paid to the FDA, it is the promise of future employment by the relevant agencies of people in the agencies, ie they are basically auditioning for those future positions by their performance in their supervision of those industries. They are provided future benefits for present services, as it were. Also there is the issue of patents, and other corrupting factors that influence their decisions. The feedback loop from the industry upon the supervising agency is self corrupting and thereby forms a state of Deep Capture. Deep Capture is, in fact, the very genesis of the Deep State where govt acts according to some outside influence rather than according to good governance, another hallmark of the Deep State. This is the source of the influence over the administrators constituting the Deep State, but not the actual power.
The source of the actual power with which the administrators wield in obedience of their benefactors comes in the form of the authority by which the legislature empowers them to act using vague language, and which the relevant agencies are at liberty to interpret to the benefit of either the relevant industry or themselves, as they see fit. The agencies are in effect the people in the govt who translate the laws from written language into enacted policies and their interpretations are only limited by the judgements of the courts. The courts alone can restrict the agencies interpretations, but have largely failed to do so over the past hundred years. This is the source of the power of the Deep State which is basically open to the influence/corruption of the industry they are meant to supervise. Instead, the incestuous relationships between the agency and the industry is quite remarkably palpable, terribly beneficial to both the members of the agency and the industry, but fails to provide the rigorous supervision required for good governance. This is the Deep State. This is how a man as corrupt as Fauci was able to maintain his position over 40yrs even as he has failed miserably, broken laws and performed injurious and illicit actions leading to all forms of mischief upto and including death (read Kennedy’s book).
The govt is in the fist of Big Business ie the regulated industries, but there is no way to control those members of the govt that actually implement policy to the benefit of the Big Business, which is the point of Schedule F.
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@peloni
Correction: it should say “if business does NOT need to contribute its share to Social Security”
@peloni
You understood my comment perfectly.
The problem is that neither the FDA, nor the CDC (and there may be other government agencies in this situation) can be considered to be independent government bureaucracies which do as they see fit.
As I recall, both of these agencies are heavily funded by private business interests (which supports my argument).
The US government is the fist of the Big Business, and Schedule F, if adopted, would represent a further takeover of the government bureaucracy by the private interests except that it would be ordered directly from the top.
Very simple – ask yourself – Who benefits?
Recall, that when Trump ordered the FDA/CDC? to put through a COVID vaccine at a “whirlwind speed”, they followed along fairly easily.
Following Trump’s order’s re: HCQ would put on the market a cheap and reliable medication which would save lives and thwart the need for the “vaccine”, and as such prevent the Pharma from generating enormous profits, I could add more to this but I don’t feel like it right now.
Trump administration also was busily removing the environmental restrictions for business from the start to the end of its term, trying to kill Social Security (if business does need to contribute its share to Social Security, it also increases profits) – no protests or sticks in the wheels noted.
As far as the US presidents being mere puppets – I am sure each of them has some influence but they can hardly be considered absolute monarchs (even in those cases, it is the court which makes the king).
Imagine to yourself that you are now President – would you be able to govern without any help from others?
@Reader
Your comment is really a bit more scattered than usual, but I am gathering your thesis is that lobbyists acting on behalf of business interests is what should be avoided and Schedule F is playing into the hands of the lobbyists. Correct me if this is inaccurate, but I am going to presume this was your meaning.
Lets consider the FDA. Trump ordered the HHS to release HCQ to the public. The head of the HHS handed the order over to Rick Bright of BARDA who then consulted with Janet Woodcock of the FDA to then release HCQ under an EUA, despite the fact that the drug was not experimental, not new on the market and associated with any serious toxicity when used in correct dosages, but they released it as if it were and were able to thereby restrict the access to the drug. Consequently, the drug was restricted to only be used in the very late stages of the Covid disease to people who were already hospitalized, intubated and doing poorly. They did this knowing that the drug is only effective at stopping the growth of the virus in the body and that takes place in the week after exposure long before anyone is hospitalized. So they knew that the drug was being given to people who could not gain any benefit from it. They also knew that the drug was the only treatment at the time to be offered to people as early treatment, or at least this was the intent of Pres. Trump’s order, so they knew they were denying the treatment to the people who needed it til it was no longer effective.
So, if you are correct, that there is no Deep State, no bureaucratic state, or administrative state (don’t really care what you name it) in which the non-elected officials are actually running the state, and the lobbyists are the ones controlling the President, and it is the lobbyists controlling the policy thru the president/elected officials, how do you explain this feat by a bunch of administrators who played hot potato til the president’s policy was halted. If the presidency is simply a stooge for the business lobbyists who all do as they are instructed, how is it that Trump’s policy was ignored and circumvented. His orders weren’t vague and the main culprit at the center of this conspiracy, Bright, has confessed to it all.
@Edgar
Indeed, it was quite shocking. I struggled to write a summary of his findings but it was quite lengthy and as I trimmed it back I came to accept that rather tahn summarizing the very dense information shared by Jovan was really best just viewed at the link I had shared. Here is a link with all the introductory statements of the AZ locals trimmed out:
https://rumble.com/v1aaxth-arizona-forensic-audit-presentation-by-jovan-hutton-pulitzer.html
Ted shared an article which did a good job summarizing the highlights, but I really suggest that you watch the video. I knew it would be a very big reveal, as Patrick Byrne shared as much on his Locals account, but the revelations were even greater than I had expected. Here is a quick list of a few key items Jovan shared, from the article Ted shared:
The entire article can be found here:
https://www.israpundit.org/predetermined-algorithms-source-of-widespread-election-fraud-in-arizona/
If you have the time, watch the video. It is well worth the two hours and much easier to follow than the article, at least I found it to be so.
PELONI-
The other day, you posted that Jovan Pulitzer was giving some evidence of election fraud. Do you know the sequel to this, the effect or the result>
The “invisible power” is the giant corporations and the super-rich, and they are NOT patriots.
Schedule F is the worst thing that could ever happen to the federal government.
The government bureaucracy must be completely separate from business interests and cannot be run like a business by “managers”.
Transferring the power to the so-called elected politicians who are under the thumb of the lobbyists will lead to fascism sooner or later.
Both the Pagan Roman Empire and the Greek Roman Empire (Byzantium) ultimately fell because they were taken over by business interests.
Many US universities have been virtually destroyed by the business-like approach with a level or more of management added to the hierarchy to the point where university professors no longer have the right to set their own schedules and must have their courses approved by the managers.
Since the only courses deemed worthy are the one which teach practical skills and/or are money makers for the university, the subjects like the classics, linguistics, etc. stop being offered by many universities.
The result for the government will be a 100 times worse because of the much wider reach and influence of any changes in government policy.
The US voters have been going to the polls and voting for the candidates preselected by the corrupt politicians who are influences by the lobbyists, etc. for at least 100 years now, so it is almost fummy to read about the “stolen” elections.
@B.Poster
And just as they stole the recent GA primaries and the recent Colorado primaries.
This lawsuit that is scheduled for next session was timed to not ‘interfere’ with the ongoing fraud that is taking place in the current primaries and will not ‘interfere’ with the fraud that will no doubt take place in the 2022 general elections. Whereas it is essential that something be done, justice delayed is justice denied and this court case will not be capable of preventing any fraud for another two years, even should the case procure a ruling to render the elections more secure. This is an ongoing outrage!
Someone needs to end the current “electoral shenanigans.” Unless this happens it’s going to be problematic at best to change anything no matter how we vote as they will simply steal the elections the same way they stole the presidential and GA Senate elections.
Supreme Court Poised To End Leftwing Election Shenanigans