Revolving Door Project | The Current Capacity Crisis

This article was originally published in Watchdog Weekly. Read it here.

Yesterday, RDP released a major update to our corporate enforcement capacity tracker. The page provides a one-stop-shop to look at major developments in the resources and workload of federal agencies that protect American citizens. Covering 14 departments and agencies across the executive branch, it documents all of the reporting from the past 21 months most necessary to understand how the Trump administration has rapidly dismantled the civil service that we all came to rely on, often more than we realized.

These 14 agencies are among the most central in American life. They oversee our food supply, our financial system, our treatment in the workplace, vehicular safety, access to housing, electricity, and more. When they are in fighting shape, they ensure that the rich pay their fair share in taxes, enforce our laws, and make sure our air is safe to breathe.

As the deterioration of the American civil service has continued, coupled with the selective enforcement of the law according to the president’s priorities, unions and courts have managed to stave off some of the worst emaciation of the administrative state. Whether those victories prove durable, or whether the Trump administration is able to get their in-house umpires at the Supreme Court to reverse strike calls to balls, only time will tell.

In short, the update is mostly bad news, interspersed with faint signs of life.

One of the silver linings of pulling all of this together is reading a huge degree of coverage from all sorts of writers and journalists, each diligently chronicling the happenings of their own niche.

It’s easy to despair about the state of news media and the gutting of professional journalism, as well as how talented reporters have been turned into pawns in oligarchic influence schemes, a la 60 Minutes, and targeted by government reprisal for being a roadblock to authoritarian schemes (see, e.g. the Pentagon press pool). That inclination is a huge part of why RDP works to critique when media coverage of important policies lapses into reheated neoliberal talking points.

This process of combing through reporting on the intricacies of the Trump-Musk-Vought campaign to selectively demolish government capacity was somehow (perversely?) enough to restore a little glimmer of hope for informed citizenry and the power of discourse to do some good in the world. In particular, I would highly recommend anyone interested in agriculture or food policy check out the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and Midwest Investigates. If financial regulation is your jam, Evan Weinberger at Bloomberg Law and Douglas Gillison at Reuters are indispensable. And for general coverage of developments in the administrative state, Government Executive and Federal News Network are unmatched.

Anyways, I thought it might be nice to start on a positive note. But that’s enough of that.

The federal government is a mess. And it’s hurting people across the country. We don’t have enough firefighters to contain infernos. USDA is fighting the return of screwworm parasites down 25 percent of its animal health experts. More generally, farmers are increasingly unable to access basic services from the Farm Service Administration, often dealing with frequent office closures and uncertain program funding and staffing. The EPA has functionally ceased all enforcement of the Clean Air Act. HUD has nearly stopped its enforcement of anti-discrimination law, while blocking anyone else from stepping in. The CFTC conducted what the New York Times classified as a “purge” to chill enforcement of financial regulations on the crypto industry. Staff at the CFPB were threatened with “most unpleasant” consequences if they didn’t go easy on financial firms. Investigations into child labor at Tyson are being imperiled by a lack of staff at DOL.

All that to say: whenever you catch yourself worried about if your salad will give you explosive diarrhea or whether your meat has parasites that had been eliminated decades ago or whether landlords are free to discriminate against you or your loved ones, you can blame Trump, Vought, and Musk. They did that.

Even more disheartening are the little ways that this administration is going out of its way to punish federal workers and put the public in harm’s way.

In the course of researching for this tracker update, I learned about the ongoing saga at the DOJ of the department seeking to deny telework accommodations to employees with disabilities. I was also startled to learn that under Harmeet Dhillon, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division hired an incoming class of overwhelmingly white staff as it shifts its attention to “prioritize claims of “reverse discrimination” against white and U.S.-born workers, combat what it terms “gender ideology,” and roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies across the federal government and private sector.”

The FTC may not have the resources to conduct antitrust enforcement (y’know, one of its fundamental jobs), but don’t worry, they’ve got enough left in the tank to go after trans kids!

Last year, I wrote that Trump was overseeing the “administrative state’s Kafkaesque transmogrification into the mafia state.” This year, that assessment seems too generous. At least the mafia’s protection racket includes some protection. The government is still being turned into a tool for the enrichment of Trump and company, that much is true. But, the components that aren’t actively involved in those efforts are now marionettes in a right-wing culture war puppet show. Officials are being sent in to meddle in elections and attack the vulnerable, posting it all online to rile up the base in the hopes that no one notices that in the United States today, it’s less safe to drive, eat, and even breathe than it was two years ago.

Public service is still being hollowed out. The cavity left behind is being filled with petty vindictiveness and indifference towards Americans who need a hand.

Check out the full tracker here!

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