Among the many things that drive me up the wall (I’m close to the ceiling most of the time) is the common inability to distinguish between bigger government and inappropriately intrusive government. What the Founders feared was a government that invaded the individual liberties of citizens, not a government that established new agencies to deal with new problems.
This isn’t, I hasten to say, a misconception held only by Republicans. I still remember a friend who worked for the state during the Evan Bayh administration. His small agency was addressing the then-emerging problems of HIV. The federal government instituted a program that would have paid to place two more desperately-needed personnel in his agency–including the overhead costs of their employment. He was told he couldn’t take advantage of that program because Bayh didn’t want exposure to the accusation that state employment had increased during his term in office.
I think about that persistent bias against numerical growth–the very common inability to differentiate between the growth of power and authority and an increase in manpower–whenever I read about Musk’s determination to slash the size of government while blithely erasing limits on its authority.
In the late 19th century, the government chemist Harvey Washington Wiley proved several shocking suspicions about the American food supply as correct: Milk was routinely thinned with dirty water, coffee contained bone, ground pepper was full of dirt, cocoa was packed with sand, and cayenne was loaded with brick dust.
The findings turned Wiley into a crusader for food safety, and by 1906 Congress finally agreed that regulations were needed. With the passage of the Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act, the United States created the framework for a federal system to test ingredients, inspect food factories and recall unsafe products.
This system has been criticized as seriously underfunded and often overcautious. But it has prevented a return to the fraudulent and poisonous food supply of the 19th century, which one historian called the “century of the great American stomachache.” That is, until recently, when the Trump administration began to unravel that safety net.
When this nation’s Founders wrote the Constitution, most Americans still grew their own food. If mom wanted to cook chicken for dinner, she was likely to go out in the yard and wring the neck of one of her flock; if that chicken was ill, the consequences were her responsibility. When food preparation became an industry, responsibility for product safety became a communal issue. The representatives of We the People decided (properly, in my view) that government had an obligation to regulate that production.
Our mad king doesn’t recognize that responsibility, and we are all endangered by the heedless effort to reduce government employment and responsibility.
Along with its other ill-considered actions, the administration has been targeting food safety programs for “downsizing.” As the linked article notes, last month two Department of Agriculture advisory committees that had provided guidance on fighting microbial contamination of food as well as meat inspection protocols were simply shut down. (If that wasn’t dangerous enough, the administration also expanded the ability of some meat processors to speed up their production lines–a provision that makes it more difficult to carry out careful inspections.)
The administration also delayed a rule that would have required both manufacturers and grocery companies to quickly investigate food contamination and pull risky products from sale. At the start of April, thousands of federal health workers were fired on the orders of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; a plan called for terminating 3,500 employees at the Food and Drug Administration — a move that he welcomed as a “revolution.” Consumer watchdogs and others described it as a safety blood bath.
Of course, it isn’t just food safety. Or drug efficacy. The Founders didn’t envision an FAA, either. Forgive me for wondering whether the recent rash of air mishaps is connected to the “downsizing” of that agency. And while the MAGA morons dispute the reality of climate change–okay, the utility of science generally–the EPA also protects the water we drink and the air we breathe from industrial pollution, among other things that didn’t exist in the 1700s. The list goes on.
The threat to individual liberty doesn’t come from the employment of officials to monitor food and drug safety, or oversee air traffic. The threat comes from autocrats unwilling to respect the constraints of the Bill of Rights.
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