If the Trump administration has an Achilles Heel or intellectual blind spot, is it Twitter.
Trump spent a long time as a reality TV star. Not just The Apprentence but with the WWE and building the Trump Brand.
You can take the reality TV star away from reality TV but you can’t take the reality TV star attitude away from the reality TV star. He tweets are like the attention grabbing clip from the end of an episode that makes you want to watch the next episode to see what happens next.
So when someone within the Trump Administration tweets something that causes a stir, I have to see what it is.
In this case, it was beautiful (link in text, image captured for posterity).
Seema Verma is the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. She has a degree from Johns Hopkins in public health with a concentration in health policy and management. She worked as a consultant helping companies navigate Obamacare.
The backlash to her Tweet was what you can imagine.
https://twitter.com/ByronTau/status/1057729805154746376
This is America's administrator of health care for elderly, disabled and low-income people mocking the idea of everyone having health care. https://t.co/2iEYEXzQlV
— Alastair Gee (@alastairgee) October 31, 2018
How the the Medicare administrator mock Medicare!?! What gall!?!
Au contraire…
I have talked about the Iron Law of Bureaucracy before.
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
A typical Washington bureaucrat administrator would fight for Medicare for all because it would give her more power, a bigger budget, and greater influence.
Her drive for Medicare for All would have nothing to do with providing healthcare for people and everything to do with the power and prestige that comes from managing such a huge government agency.
Anybody who knows about how much Medicare, the Indian Health Service, or the VA sucks at healthcare understand that goverment managed healthcare is awful. the politicians who want it, want it because it gives them more authority over peoples’ lives.
On a side note, one of the people I admire most in DC is Secretary of Offense Defense James Mattis. Mattis isn’t a bureaucrat and seems mostly immune to the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.
Clearly Administrator Verma hates, or at least understands the shit-ass reality of, the program she runs.
I hope she is resentful as hell that she had to give up a lucrative consulting job to manage this goverment agency at goverment employee pay and she wants nothing more than to go back to the private sector and not deal with this God Damned bureaucrats.
That is the best inoculant against Iron-Law-of-Bureaucracy-itis I can think of.
She seems to have no desire to expand the program she is running and that is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen come out of a DC bureaucrat.
With limited exception, from now on I want every bureaucrat to hate the agency they are in charge of.
I want a ware fighter in charge of the DOD and an astronaut in charge of NASA. People who are focused on the mission and not the bureaucracy.
Nothing will make America better than if the administrators hate the bureaucracy and act against the Iron Law.
Unfortunate we’ve already had an astronaut in charge of NASA, quite a few in fact. With mixed results. The last one was a pathetic BO butt kisser who did more to destroy the agency’s capabilities and mission than enhance it.