Chapter 5 – Delaw America [i] (AKA Reform The Bureaucracy - What Some Call "The Deep State")

In this series, political commentator John Scully argues the Left has lost its way, focusing on banning plastic straws instead of building an American where all people can work & lead dignified lives.

The social contract between labor and capital is failing. Simply put, the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else. Work no longer provides for the basic needs of working people and their families. The Left has spun off into a fragmented wilderness of innumerable policy demands, forgetting that work is the basis of a healthy society. To lead the country out of the wilderness, the Left must turn its energy to making work pay for life’s basics – food, home, health, financial security and protection from the coming AI upheaval. Success will not come without a change of attitude toward empathy and caring for all working people no matter their cultural, religious or political background. Read Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 Chapter 4.

Illustration by RichardsDrawings, from Pixabay.com.

The Reglamento

It is time to delaw America. There are far too many laws, regulations and rules telling Americans what to do and how to do it. Let us call all of this “the reglamento”. The sheer size of the reglamento has two effects:

1. The cost to implement it crushes the economy;

2. and it robs the citizen of responsibility.

The economic and social health of America requires that we vigorously prune the reglamento.

So, What Is It?

The reglamento is extremely comprehensive. It’s sum of all laws, regulations and rules passed by governments and the sum of the costs this all imposes on society. Generally, laws state a desired goal, but bureaucracies are left to develop detailed regulations for day-to-day implementation.

At the Federal level there are 175,000 pages of regulations. Those guiding purchasing (the FAR, Federal Acquisition Regulation), alone take 2,100 pages. These are just the rules officially approved through the formal rule making process included in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). Every Federal agency also adds its own less formal guidance for implementing these 175,000 pages adding untold thousands of more pages.

But, the reglamento is vastly larger than the Federal level burden. Every state has the same process of making laws, writing implementing regulations and then providing additional clarifying directives. I do not need to research the size of each state’s regulatory body to make a general point. The states add vast inflation to the reglamento. California Code of Regulations (CCR) alone contributes 31,000 pages.

But wait, you get more!

Envision this whole process taking place in your county, city, town, special jurisdiction, HOA, etc. I queried Google’s AI on this, and it could not come up with a way of quantifying the contribution to the reglamento produced by these bodies, but you know it is unfathomably enormous.

For the most part, the reglamento exists because lawmakers and bureaucrats try to solve problems. But, even assuming that the motives behind the reglamento are pure, four Iron Rules of Bureaucracy act to destroy the intended public good.

The Four Iron Rules of Bureaucracy

What I call the Four Iron Rules of Bureaucracy start the destruction. ^[ii]

COMPLEXITY

The first is Complexity: The more complex the task, the slower the results. The bodies of people we call bureaucracies are tasked with implementing their portion of the reglamento. Not only must employees adhere to the rules guiding their own basic mission, they must also adhere to myriad rules imposed by small business, anti-discrimination, environmental, preservation, etc. bureaucracies.

Further, they must adhere to instructions originating from outside the legal reglamento such as DEI, regulatory review by the Office of Management and Budget, and/or reference to the personal wishes of powerful politicians and committees of Congress. A proposed agency action must be reviewed by all the representatives of these interests. Like the weakest link in a chain, the process is slowed down by the slowest or most persistently negative of the many parties that must approve the agency action, and there are few institutional incentives to speed things up.

Everyone has to have their say, or nothing gets done. At times this resembles a circular firing squad where the only action being taken is a circle of bureaucrats shooting at each other with little or nothing of benefit for the public escaping from the black hole that is the circle.

Much has been written about the horrifying results of this complexity. In the name of great social good, it costs over $1,000,000 dollars to add one new affordable housing unit in one city in California. There are daily articles about large beneficial programs that are either cancelled or accomplished only after many years of bureaucratic wrangling resulting in inflated costs because of the complexity of fitting all the bureaucratic parts together. The cost of the California high speed rail system has grown from $33 billion to $128 billion or more. The city of Santa Fe, NM spends $14,000,000 a year on its estimated 374 homeless population. That’s more than $37,000 per person. I don’t see much effect on the streets of this beautiful city.

A sage during my career at NASA warned against placing new people in a bureaucracy “to add value because they will”. He was warning against this ever-increasing complexity.

LITIGATION

The second iron rule is Litigation: the inevitability of litigation accompanying complexity. Even if some worthy action emerges from the internal bureaucratic circular firing squad, dissatisfied outside parties will use the complexity of the reglamento to fuel litigation against the agency action. Laws written with the best of intentions, and interpreted by the best intended of regulations, are universally used by aggrieved parties to stop or alter the proposed agency action. Laws affecting endangered species, clear air and water, historic preservation, and many others are routinely used to sabotage proposed agency action. If an agency action is not done perfectly, a lawyer will find a judge to stop it.

This statistic grossly but meaningfully captures the magnitude of this litigation: The value of legal services in the U.S. 2025 is forecast to be $305,000,000,000.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

The third iron law is Unintended Consequences. The reglamento is riddled with laws/regulations/rules passed with little anticipation of negative results or the means of judiciously remedying these results. The politicians writing the laws wrote what was in their heads at the time without reference to future actions by people who have different ideas.

Perfect examples are ancient laws passed to govern potential insurrections, imposition of tariffs, or the conduct of recipients of Federal money are now used in ways antithetical to the intentions of the original writers. Clean water and air reglamento are used (by lawyers) to block any damaging action no matter how insignificant, sometimes at great economic cost. Laws regulating endangered species are used to block action that might endanger a species no matter how limited or insignificant that species is and no matter the economic consequences.

Laws written for a simple, pure outcome simply cannot foresee and deal with the ever changing, complicated and impure nature of complex reality. They are written without an expiration date (think Insurrection Act of 1807), and the only way to fix their flaws is an amendment to the law. Not only is this cumbersome, but in a divided political environment, impossible.

CHICO’S LAW

The fourth iron law I will call Chico’s Law. In the movie the Magnificent Seven, one of the seven is Chico, formerly a peasant, who gives an impassioned speech about why the peasant villagers acted so cowardly. He convincingly avows that they acted that way from fear and lack of trust in the Magnificent Seven’s protection.

You will not like this analogy, but I speak as an ex Federal executive well versed in bureaucratic motivation. Federal employees are not Deep State Demons. They are the peasants in the Magnificent Seven. They are people trying to do jobs made close to impossible by the reglamento. FBI agents, those you see as the heroes in the evening crime shows, start as a GS-10 and can advance to GS-13 in a non-supervisory role. These wonderful people are NOT deep state employees out to thwart or persecute the citizen. They are low to mid-level employees doing their best to make sense of a complex world. As are the vast majority of public servants serving you, the public.

If they screw up, their careers are toast, and this is the basis of Chico’s Law. What power do you think a GS 12 employee has against a powerful lobby group, Senator or Congressman, or his own political appointee executive? None! Many are now being fired simply because they were part of prosecutions the current administration did not like.

The Chico’s Law is that bureaucracies continually perfect the details of the reglamento to protect themselves from forces far more powerful than they are. If an employee’s decision explicitly follows the guiding rules, she cannot easily be fired. So, actions are governed not by taking a risk on behalf of the public, but by fear of a bad and punishable outcome not based explicitly on rules. Thus, the reglamento has a built-in growth hormone.

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^[i] If you are wondering where cited statistics come from, google the subject.

^[ii] Some see this without any understanding of what is happening and call it the “Deep State”.