Commentary
It’s well and good to inveigh against agency capture and corruption at the administrative state. It’s another matter actually to do something about it. In order to solve the problem you have to discover how it works. And that’s not easy.
That’s because of the way these systems of regulation, administration, and redistribution are set up and evolve over decades, with countless layers of seeming oversight that is actually enablement, revolving doors of influence, deep contacts with the media, and vast flurries of fake studies that seem to affirm that the status quo is just great.
Many outsiders have tried. Cabinet officials and agency heads have come and gone for decades while the agencies eat their reputations for three meals a day. It’s a sad thing to watch. All institutional knowledge rests with the bureaucracy and none with the reformers, meaning that they fail every time.
All of this is a neglected area of study. How precisely can these bureaucracies be reformed if they are built to be unreformable? How can corruption be ended if every layer of oversight is itself corrupt? How can even the most well-intentioned reformer stand a chance against gigantic and entrenched machines of compulsion, blackmail, graft, payola, and propaganda?
Here is a case study that is starting to show some modicum of success, perhaps the first I’ve ever seen.
The problem in question is the pharmaceutical industry and the products called vaccines in particular. There are two agencies involved: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, both of which exist under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It is well known that these are all hotbeds of quid pro quos that use science as cover.
HHS is now headed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He has long sworn to end agency capture and reassert authentic science that does not necessarily serve industry needs.
The CDC hosts something called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices or ACIP. It is a committee filled with seemingly independent experts who are not.
The next section will bore you but stick with it because it is significant.
