Fear Factor, the Washington edition
The nation's capital is uneasy, and it's about time
“Imagine a world where your greatest fears become reality.”
That was the introduction narrative for a reality TV show on NBC in the early 2000s called “Fear Factor.” The show was hosted by Joe Rogan, which shocked my memory when I looked it up, but that’s for another column. Today, the fear factor has finally come to institutional Washington, and voters in the rest of the country should feel a sense of justice.
DC doyenne columnist Sally Quinn sobbed in a New York Times missive last week:
“This spring Washington is a city in crisis. Physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually…Nobody feels safe. Nobody feels protected. This is a city where people seek and, if it all goes well for them, wield power. But today in Washington those who hold – or once held – the most power are often the most scared.”
Quinn may be under-estimating Official DC’s resilience, but if in fact it’s scared, that was the entire point.
Donald Trump was elected in 2016 by the voters almost entirely because he was a disruptor. As Salena Zito and I wrote in The Great Revolt, Trump’s accomplishment was overthrowing both parties, and the last wheezing vestiges of them that Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton represented. Washington refused to read the room, however, and proceeded apace.
Trump’s first term was hamstrung from the start for internal and external reasons, but a very similar coalition elected him again in 2024, and mostly for the same reason they did in 2016. These voters wanted Washington upended, deconstructed, and if necessary, scared – scared of them, that is, and with good reason.
Over the last 40 years, the American economy has left the manufacturing class and its service sector successors constantly scared.
If you worked in a plant making hosiery – like my family did – or in a furniture mill in North Carolina or supervised a call center in Utah, your job is now done by someone in Asia, thanks to the trade deals hawked by the ever-comfortable lobbyists and economists at U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable in Washington.
If you worked in the resource business, building pipelines, harvesting timber, or doing office work for a coal company – your job is gone and the environmental regulators in Washington who killed it cycled through a revolving door to become a lobbyist or association executive as a reward for their destruction of your career. If you worked for a large corporation that downsized as politicians mismanaged the economy, or approved anti-competitive mergers that fattened hedge fund returns, your job is gone, and Washington is a big reason why.
If you’re a small business owner who saw your labor and transportation costs skyrocket thanks to Joe Biden’s appeasing the hopes and dreams of liberal lobbyists, you may have been forced out of business, but those lobbyists toasted each other over fashionably scant portions of kale and quinoa in DuPont Circle bistros.
Through every recession, every oil price spike, every real estate crash, every wave of off-shoring and out-sourcing, the jobs of the bureaucrats and association heads, lobbyists and lawyers in the nation’s capital were insulated from storms and waves. The permanent governing class – whether inside or outside the government itself -- had nothing to fear.
America is a frontier nation, and risk is an inherent component in our collective success. Millions of individual calculated gambles taken daily by brave people push us forward without looking back. The arc of history does not bend toward progress, as self-styled “progressives” like to think – but the sweat and guts of risk takers does propel the whole enterprise onward. Gambling is the engine inherent to capitalism, but government’s regulators and manipulators are historically and intentionally immune to risk.
The Gallup Organization’s polling says three out of four Americans are concerned about the “size and power of the federal government.” Congress’ approval rating has been mired under 30 percent for decades – but the public dissatisfaction may extend beyond the people in Congress and to the every-growing mission of the whole enchilada.
Except for the early pandemic months, a clear majority of citizens polled have consistently, for 15 years, told Gallup they think government is doing too much. Yep, deaf Washington keeps doing more, not less. Despite widespread customer dissatisfaction, nobody at Washington’s government agencies or their contracted proxies have ever feared losing their jobs. Until now.
The idea that now, the people who operate our mediocre government might be at risk of losing their jobs is not alarming to regular Americans. The polls are clear on that. As much ink as the Washington-based media has spilled on negative DOGE anecdotes, it’s not registering alarm with the public.
The DOGE efforts to whack agencies and eliminate waste and redundancy are undeniably imperfect, as even Elon Musk cautioned they would be.
They’ve resulted in mistakes of the macro and micro variety – some due to arcane rules that prevent more sensible down-sizing and some due to DOGE’s adopted Silicon Valley ethos of “most fast and break things.” The DOGE-rs had to recall a group of people who handle the nuclear secrets, for example. Some terminated probationary employees were talented senior people who’d merely switched positions late in their careers only to wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time, having their livelihood or retirement gutted for the wrong reason. Some cuts have been ugly; others have been long overdue. Nobody who is well-meaning in the thrust to shake up or right-size Washington should be celebrating the mistakes.
In the end, the DOGE process will not secure the ambitious level of budgetary savings it touted at the beginning – though it will be a positive on the federal budget. Not everything DOGE is doing will work, and some of it may fail spectacularly; that’s the nature of disruption.
But if the end result of the present risk infusion is bigger than dollars, and is a new normal in which government power-wielders believe they could lose their jobs if the customers are unhappy with the government, we might get more innovation out of our future functionaries. We might get a bureaucracy that keeps an eye on public approval of government and cares about it. If we do, government itself might get more respect from the risk-taking pioneers who pay its bills.