It has long been good sport to make fun of the government. Ronald Reagan did it with a fine, almost deft touch. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language,” he would tell an audience, “are I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Just about everyone, at one time or another, has used the phrase “Good enough for government work,” and we all know what it means: that something conforms to the high customer service standards one enjoys when shopping for stamps in the post office.
Government was a sort of easy punching bag and nobody much minded. It was considered harmless stuff. As long as we were compelled to have government, then we could gently mock the government we had. It was sort of an implicit deal. One of the benefits that came with being an American citizen.
But lately, government seems to have decided not to roll over and take it any more. The people in Washington who once routinely reported for work, did their jobs (more or less), and counted the days until they could retire on that splendidly guaranteed pension are now showing their teeth.
Consider three stories from the last week of September.
Start with everyone’s favorite agency, the IRS. It has been a difficult couple of years for the tax collectors. They have been shown—conclusively to all save the mainstream media—to have engaged in politically selective enforcement of the law and even in harassment of people whose agenda might be considered antigovernment. Those would be Tea Party types.
The midlevel bureaucrat who had the most to tell about this practice—one Lois Lerner—dummied up when called to answer the question of a congressional committee. The agency denied everything and claimed to have innocently destroyed evidence that might have been useful to the committee. The big chief of the IRS told Congress, essentially, to stuff its investigation and, also, that if it didn’t appropriate as much money as he said the agency needed to do its job, then the taxpayers would suffer even more than usual from slow and unprofessional service. Nobody doubted him, and he still has his job.
Well, in the waning days of September, we learned that the agency had enough money floating around to pay bonuses to more than 1,000 of its senior employees and that one of them, a lawyer, performed so ably that he got over a quarter of a million dollars. Furthermore, as reported by Paul Bedard in the Washington Examiner, ordinary IRS workers got $62.5 million in total bonuses in fiscal year 2013, which was when the targeting scandal first began to bubble. And then there was $50 million for conferences and $23.5 million for union activities. But no money to be spent for improving client services.
And aggravating as those numbers are—think about them when you are on hold, waiting to discuss a fine point of tax law on the IRS hotline—the most distressing thing is that it took a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to pry them from the agency’s claws.
Well, none of us has ever felt warmly about the IRS. But the Department of Veterans Affairs is a different story. It was not so long ago that pundits like Paul Krugman were writing that the proof government could deliver health care was right there in front of us in the form of Veterans Affairs. One merely needed eyes unblinded by right-wing ideology to see that the VA had a record of success that proved “a government agency can deliver better care at lower cost than the private sector.” Ezra Klein, the left’s tireless explainer of everything, went so far as to write, “The unquestioned leader in American health care is a government agency that employs 198,000 federal workers from five different unions, and nonetheless maintains short wait times and high consumer satisfaction.”
Well, we all subsequently learned, the VA routinely denied health care to eligible veterans and covered it up through the usual bureaucratic legerdemain. And, in a nearly sublime exercise of arrogance, some of the responsible bureaucrats rewarded themselves with performance bonuses.
So late last month, as we learned of the IRS giving itself little gifts, it came out that VA executives had found a ploy that enabled them to get their fingers on some taxpayer cash. It is pretty simple, really. You get yourself transferred from one VA jurisdiction to another. Maybe get a little promotion along with the change of scenery. And then knock down moving expenses that would be justified if you were transporting priceless artworks. Which, by the way, is not so farfetched when it comes to the VA. It has recently come to light that the VA shelled out just under half a million for a rock sculpture that adorns the courtyard of its facility in Palo Alto. According to its designers, the rock is intended to evoke “a sense of transformation, rebuilding, and self-investigation.”
Meanwhile, back in the real world of wage freezes and bureaucratic ploys for getting around them, 22 senior executives in the VA were transferred to positions where their salaries were increased or their responsibilities reduced. In the most egregious case, one VA bureaucrat in Washington used her authority to create a vacancy in Philadelphia and set herself up to fill it. The new job came with fewer responsibilities but the same money ($181,497), and the move up I-95 cost taxpayers a mere $300,000.
Responding to disclosure of this, the VA has said it will investigate and get back to us in 30 days. Which is its way of saying, “Buzz off, we are busy creating inspirational rock gardens.”
Meanwhile, when the VA’s scams and scandals first boiled over, the agency vowed to clean things up by the end of September. It missed the deadline, to the astonishment of no one. On September 28, the backlog of disability claims stood at more than 75,000.
Finally, there is the third entry in the trifecta. This one does not entail sleazy bureaucratic enrichment schemes or passive stonewalling of Congress but outright, proactive, and hostile acts by a federal police agency against a sitting member of Congress.
The Secret Service has had a bad run of late. It has been embarrassed by agents indulging in drunken orgies in foreign countries; failing to secure the White House to the point where an armed intruder made it inside; and driving into an active crime scene while off duty and possibly intoxicated.
Serious stuff, then. Serious enough to provoke a congressional investigation. To which the Secret Service responded with an effort to smear the member of the House who is leading the investigation. Seems Rep. Jason Chaffetz once attempted to become a member of the Secret Service and was turned down, the reasons for which remain in the agency’s files. Governments hold on to that kind of information.
One of the agency’s senior people wrote to another of the agency’s (many) senior people that it might be a good idea to check out those files because “Some information that [Chaffetz] might find embarrassing needs to get out.”
This is not the kind of ordinary Washington hardball that everyone is proud of playing. This is—not to put too fine a point on it—an exercise in blackmail. A bureaucracy—a law enforcement agency, no less—baring its fangs. And it wasn’t just an idle memo exchange between two senior bureaucrats who undoubtedly have lots of time on their hands. According to an inspector general’s report (and don’t IGs have to be the busiest people in Washington, these days?), some 45 people in the agency accessed Chaffetz’s records. All but 4 of them were unauthorized, and at least 18 of them senior staff.
The head of the agency said the usual things about how the facts would come out and the guilty be held accountable and this stood up until it was revealed that he himself was among the guilty and had forgotten this inconvenient fact.
This one may involve actual crimes—violations of the Privacy Act and all sorts of conspiracy raps and, who knows, maybe even a RICO beef. The Justice Department is fond of those. But, of course, Justice is unlikely to employ that or any of the other prosecutorial weapons in its arsenal. That would constitute what the military calls “friendly fire.”
Justice, the Secret Service, Veterans Affairs, the Internal Revenue Service. All on the same team and all playing a game that has moved way beyond Washington hardball.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
