The Deep State's takeover of American life is based on a simple promise: "Give us more power, and we'll keep you safe."
The bureaucrats running the alphabet soup of federal agencies believe they know what's best for us. They think they can dictate our health decisions, our educational decisions, and our economic decisions. They take our freedom away with the promise that they're doing "what's best" for us.
The promise has always been a lie, but the COVID-19 pandemic brought that lie to the light of day. The bureaucracy didn't keep us safe, and yet they continue to strip away our freedoms.
The Centers for Disease Control is Exhibit A of this incompetence. In a thorough piece for Reason, Peter Suderman walks through all the ways the CDC dropped the ball. Here's how he begins:
The pandemic was a test of America's public health bureaucracy. It failed.
Those failures were legion, and they were spread across multiple officials, agencies, and layers of government. But no institution failed quite as abysmally as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which, through a combination of arrogance, incompetence, and astonishingly poor planning, wasted America's only chance to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 before it spread widely.
The CDC is supposed to be America's frontline institution in the fight against infectious disease. Its job is to analyze viral threats, track their spread and development, and provide the public with relevant information about how to respond to outbreaks. Not only did the agency do this job poorly in the early stages of the pandemic, but it actively hindered efforts that would have greatly improved America's response, and it made planning errors that were both predictable and avoidable. At nearly every stage of the pandemic, the CDC got things wrong and got in the way. Its failures almost certainly made America's pandemic worse.
As Suderman explains, the problems arose not due to honest mistakes but because the CDC refused to give up control of the COVID test development process. Rather than allow private firms to create a reliable COVID test, the CDC insisted on making their own test in-house. Even after that test provided unreliable, they continued to block private entities from helping.
The agency also refused mass testing in the early days of the pandemic because, according to Suderman, "true mass testing would have meant allowing testing that was out of the CDC's control."
So, not only did the agency botch the testing development process, it blocked the only way our country could have mitigated the virus's spread in the early days of the pandemic. Of course, it's unlikely mass testing could have totally eradicated the virus, but it certainly could have kept the entire country from shutting down all at once. If we had known where the disease was actually spreading, certain communities could have stayed open.
The root of the problem isn't just bad science. It's authoritarianism. It's an entrenched Deep State that believes it is the only arbiter of truth. As Suderman explains:
The root of the problem is the agency's self-conception: It sees itself as the ultimate arbiter of what is true and what to do on all matters of infectious disease. In essence, the CDC believes there is no other authority besides the CDC, so it shuts out private labs from the testing process, insists that its faulty tests actually work pretty well long after problems arise, sticks with overly complicated plans that bog down processes, and resists calls to update its guidance, even when that guidance makes living ordinary life difficult or impossible.
It's time to take the CDC and the entire bureaucratic state down a notch. Congress is too lazy and spineless to step in and reassert their control over the laws and policies under which we live. The president relies on the Deep State to enforce his agenda, and the courts have historically empowered federal agencies more than reined them in.
The Founders knew this might happen, and they gave us a way to fight back: Article V of the Constitution.
Article V gives the states the power to propose constitutional amendments at a Convention of States. These amendments can limit the power of the Deep State by prohibiting the federal government from regulating certain topics, restricting its jurisdiction to a small set of issues, and eliminating some agencies altogether.
The arrogance of the CDC and other health-related bureaucracies made this pandemic worse. If we want to avoid a similar disaster in the future, we need to find a way to humble these bureaucrats, limit their power, and return that power to the states and the people. A Convention of States is our most powerful tool, and we must use it before it's too late.
