What if you saw something bad was happening, like a burglar entering a house, so you found a cop, you told the cop — and then their shift ended and they went home. It would be frustrating. The odds that you would give up and leave would increase — the odds that you would continue to care would decrease. You might be a bit demoralized, and with three shift changes for cops every day, burglars would start getting bolder and bolder.
Welcome to the demoralizing world of fighting cronyism. You find something that is going wrong, you bring it to the attention of the people who can turn everything around, and then just as they learn how to wield their power and stop the cronies, they move onto a new job.
At least in my case the record is public, and I don’t demoralize easily. The bad news is that while I might keep attacking, I do face setbacks, and those setbacks give advantages to the cronies.
An example of what I am talking about is happening at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In late 2017, Mick Mulvaney was named the acting director of the government agency. Now, merely a year later, he was named acting White House chief of staff.
It isn’t his fault for taking the job; it isn’t President’s Trump’s fault, at least in this case, for needing to hire a new chief of staff. At high levels of government, there is a high amount of stress and inadequate compensation compared to equivalent private sector positions, so there is often a lot of turnover.
In part because of this turnover, cronyism still exists at all levels of government. In one example, in 2017 the CFPB gave an amazing amount of power to a private company.
There was an issue with some student loan collection activities that, as far as I can tell, was an actual problem and that some collections were being pursued incorrectly. But the solution didn’t include fines, penalties, jail time — it was just a crony gift. Basically, the director of the CFPB appointed profit to a friend.
While I pointed out the CFPB’s crony deal last year and asked Mick Mulvaney to turn it around, he never got the chance. Now there is a new director, Kathy Kraninger. I hope that she pursues this, among the many other issues that the CFPB seems to be intertwined with.
This is just one example. Cronyism thrives under turnover. Cronyism thrives when institutional knowledge is lost, but the private sector cronies almost never lose their institutional knowledge.
Fortunately, we are now at the point in the Trump administration that they are starting to really uncover the skeletons. Unfortunately, this is the same time that turnovers are starting to happen — and Trump has even made changes to his lobbying ban. That means that it is time to be vigilant. We need to send the message that we aren’t going away.
Or, the simple solution is that we just need a smaller government. That would solve all of these issues: Make the government too small to hide any crony skeletons.
Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill for a governor and for an academic think tank.
