President Joe Biden permitted the administrative state to create plans and implement rules in the past weeks to prevent a potential Trump administration from reforming the public health bureaucracy that controlled many draconian coronavirus rules and guidelines.
The scheme is the latest effort to prevent former President Donald Trump from “draining the swamp” upon potentially returning to office.
The term “administrative state” specifically describes the phenomenon of unaccountable and unelected administrative agencies, including the national security apparatus, exercising power to create and enforce their own rules. The administrative state uses its rule-making ability to essentially usurp the separation of powers between the three branches of government by creating a so-called fourth branch of government not formed by the Constitution.
The administrative state in the past week attempted to more deeply root its ideology within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control, and the Food and Drug Administration. Many of the agenda items Biden’s public health bureaucracy wishes to protect range from DEI to vaccination policies while creating new levels of bureaucracy, such as a soon-to-be-established scientific integrity council, purportedly to provide a framework for a “rigorous, bias-free, transparent and reliable” decision making process by “nonpartisan civil servants,” Politico reported this week.
Biden and his public health bureaucracy apparently “worry” that Trump’s potential return could cause reforms that would go against progressive ideals and the political agenda championed by Biden. Lyric Jorgenson, NIH’s designated scientific integrity official, told Politico that extra levels of bureaucracy are needed to protect science. “Interfering and manipulating science to hit a partisan agenda is inappropriate and is what we’re working to wall against,” said, noting the plan is to “generate rigorous, trusted evidence to inform public health.”
Biden’s move to protect the public health bureaucracy is the latest reported effort to safeguard the entire administrative state. In April alone, the administrative state implemented 66 significant rules, a number that is greater than in any single month since the Reagan administration, a Regulatory Studies Center analysis found. Biden’s administrative state has published 111 more regulations than Trump had implemented at the same point in his term, Axios reported. Many of the rules will protect the progressive agenda of “climate change.” Other rules are geared toward protecting Biden’s economic agenda.
“The rules are safe in this Congress,″ Michael Gerrard, who teaches environmental law at Columbia Law School, told the Associated Press, but “All bets are off” if Republicans take over Congress and the White House.
Gerrard’s comment was a reference to rules implemented before a “lookback period.” Any rules put into action before the deadline cannot be reversed by a potential Trump administration via the Congressional Review Act. When the “lookback period” begins is murky, but Axios said estimates for the deadline vary from mid-May to September.
It is also not clear if Biden’s public health scheme will be successful. Trump “could dispense with NIH’s scientific integrity plan” because “[i]t’s not written into law or regulation,” Politico reported.
Many America First conservatives are working against the administrative state. “The President never had a policy process that was designed to give him what he actually wanted and campaigned on,” Russell Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget, told Time in April. “[We are] sorting through the legal authorities, the mechanics, and providing the momentum for a future Administration.”
Before Trump left office in 2021, he signed an executive order (EO) to reclassify federal government employees into Schedule F, which would have allowed the president to enhance accountability and job performance within the bureaucratic agencies. “You have some people that are protected that shouldn’t be protected,” Trump said in April about Schedule F.
Biden canceled the order in 2021, but if Trump reclaims the White House, he will reportedly reimplement the executive order and purge the unelected technocrats artificially running the federal government. “It would effectively upend the modern civil service, triggering a shock wave across the bureaucracy,” Axios previously concluded in mid-2022 about the EO’s impact.
“The mere mention of Schedule F,” Vought said, “ensures that the bureaucracy moves in your direction.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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