Not many years ago Republican lobbyist Grover Norquist charmingly quipped that he’d like to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.” Now, after eight years of Barack Obama’s tenure as lifeguard ends, it appears that Donald Trump is trying to make Norquist’s dream come true.
Much commentary has accompanied the assembly of the Trump cabinet. Many of the nominees are breathtakingly unqualified, but too little attention has been paid to the aggregate effect of the appointees and nominees. In most instances the person advanced by the Trump team is hostile to the function they would be charged with leading.
This tactic has been a staple of conservative politics, at least since the Reagan era. Early among Reagan’s acts of government subversion was the emasculation of the Legal Services Corporation. The LSC is a nonprofit entity established by Congress to assure adequate legal representation to all citizens, regardless of ability to pay. Reagan appointed board members and several board chairs who were on the record as opposing the existence of the organization they were to lead. They tried to kill it. Reagan crippled the organization, but never quite shrank it to bathtub size. It remains the primary source of funding for legal services to poor folks across America.
As an educator, I’m particularly concerned about the nomination of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. DeVos, a Michigan billionaire, is married to Amway’s Richard DeVos and is the brother of Blackwater Security’s Erik Prince. Amway is just a few granite chips away from being a blatant pyramid scheme, peddling overpriced products. Blackwater, now operating with several names because of adverse publicity, is a private security firm that has earned more than $1 billion in government contracts for security around the world, apparently unencumbered by pesky ethics or accountability.
The DeVos approach to education is strikingly familiar to the family businesses.
DeVos is a fierce proponent of school privatization. She has lobbied for and funded the initiatives that have essentially decimated public education in Michigan. She has unabashedly supported public funding of private, religious and for-profit schools through voucher schemes and the proliferation of unaccountable charter schools. She has a long and unambiguous hostility to public education and no apparent qualms about diverting taxpayer dollars into private, often religious, hands.
Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who has accepted the nomination to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has acknowledged that he has no qualifications for the job other than having lived in a house. In an ironic twist on the old cliche, I guess he thinks the HUD job is not exactly brain surgery. Like DeVos, his public comments suggest hostility to the mission of the department he would lead. He has criticized programs such as those HUD sponsors as creating “dependency” and as “social engineering.” He is of the Bootstrap University mentality that if he could do it, anyone can do it. He is on the record as stating that helping the indigent is “not the government’s job.”
One column doesn’t allow full explication of all the nominees, but here are a few other highlights:
Health and Human Services nominee Tom Price is a long-standing opponent of the Affordable Care Act. He opposed the Children’s Health Insurance Program, is pro-life, and wants all government regulation of health care reduced or eliminated.
Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions has been a fierce opponent of the Voting Rights Act and was rejected by the Senate in 1986, when nominated for the federal bench, because of a frightening record of animus toward civil rights, including allegedly joking that the Ku Klux Klan was “OK, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.” If confirmed, Sessions would be charged with enforcing the very civil rights laws that he opposes.
All of Trump’s potential nominees for Interior Secretary are in the fossil fuel business and/or have publicly supported aggressive oil, gas and coal exploration on America’s public lands.
Scott Pruitt, Trump’s recently announced pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, is a climate change skeptic, repeatedly sued the EPA while Oklahoma’s attorney general, has led an effort to overturn the Clean Power Plan, and has opposed even modest efforts to protect streams and wetlands. In short, he is hostile toward environmental protection, the mission of the agency he is now nominated to lead.
I suppose if you believe, as did Ronald Reagan, that government is the problem, not the solution, this seems like a good thing. I think not.
Public education is at great peril, due to the nefarious work of DeVos and her ideological allies. Poverty has shattered urban communities and we urgently need more commitment to affordable, safe housing, not a leader who says, “It’s not the government’s job.” Millions of Americans remain uninsured and are one illness away from bankruptcy. Voting rights and civil rights are under persistent assault. The fossil fuel industry is working to exploit America’s treasured resources and contributing to catastrophic climate changes.
I prefer James Madison’s view: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
Trump and his cronies — no angels — are aiming to dismantle government at the moment we need it most desperately.
Steve Nelson lives in Sharon and New York City, where he is the head of the Calhoun School, a private school. He can be reached at steve.nelson@calhoun.org.