Assert Civilian Control Of The BureaucracyNo unelected public employee should be allowed to gain Anthony Fauci-levels of power.
By Jason Garshfield
March 16, 2022
In 1951, President Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur after the two had a series of public disagreements over the direction of the Korean War. While Truman’s decision was deeply unpopular with voters at the time, it was ultimately the right choice, because it reasserted the basic principle of civilian control of the military.
Civilian control of the military rests on the recognition that in America, the military is subordinate to the will of the people. This principle is laid out explicitly in the Constitution, which gives control of the armed forces to a civilian Congress and commander in chief. Presidents have upheld the norm for most of our history.
There is an understandable case to be made for deferring to military officials—who, after all, know more about war than almost any politician—during times of foreign threat. But wise political leaders have always recognized that allowing military leadership to become too powerful in relation to the civilian government is the first step on the road to an American Caesar or Napoleon. However much we might dislike our politicians, at least they are directly accountable to the voters.
But the military is only one of a number of unelected government agencies, any of which, if given too much power, could pose a similar threat to public sovereignty. In modern America, we must assert a new, complementary principle: civilian control of the bureaucracy.
The career apparatchik Dr. Anthony Fauci cuts a less striking figure than General Douglas MacArthur. But in the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency, Fauci became to Trump what MacArthur was to Truman: a public critic of the president’s policy approach, and a cult figure to those who opposed it.
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Once Fauci began publicly contradicting the president, he should have been summarily fired, just like MacArthur was. His job was not to editorialize on the president’s pandemic plan, but to put that plan into action. Any disagreements should have been aired privately. If Fauci wished to exercise his First Amendment right to publicly criticize the president, then he ought to have quit—as James Mattis did when his differences with Trump proved irreconcilable.
It does not matter whether Fauci was right, any more than it mattered whether MacArthur was right in wanting to expand the war in Korea. Donald Trump was the duly elected president, and Anthony Fauci was not. Our system of representative democracy is based on the notion that the people get a say in how we are governed—not a complete say all of the time, but a very strong say much of the time. If the people sometimes make the wrong choice, it is a risk we must accept as the price of freedom. America was not designed to be an oligarchy, either of generals or scientists.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/its-time-to-assert-civilian-control-of-the-bureaucracy/
