No. of Recommendations: 4
Yup. We used to think our system was pretty foolproof. Now, we are discovering how much the entire system relied on politicians, fundamentally, being people of good will.I don't think anyone thought (or should have thought) the system was foolproof. Political power can never be eliminated or controlled - it can only be set against itself. So our system is set up not to assume that people are of good will, but to give people separate areas of power and
different political incentives from each other.
Take a step back a moment. Trump has generated a
massive amount of noise and furor. But the most important thing about Trump is that, above all else, he is very good at appearances and very short on substance. If you're favorably inclined to him you call that a showman, if you're disfavorably inclined towards him it's that he's a con man.
I recommend reading this interview, "Has Trump Achieved a Lot Less Than It Seems?," and you'll see that Trump has largely
not been able to make substantive changes to "the entire system." In fact, he's been able to do very little to "the system" at all:
https://archive.ph/XrD95Sure, he's managed to wreak more havoc on colleges and in the parts of the government that do things that conservatives hate than most prior Presidents, but only because he's heedless and thoughtless and uninterested in politics other than his own self. And he's managed to stuff his dealings with petty venality that make the featherbedding of the old Tammany Hall bosses seem quaint. But for the most part, he's been unable to effectuate any durable change to very much at all. Not because people are of good will, but because the President's power (while immense) is still structurally limited.
I thought the example of NIH funding illustrated the con man/showman/"sound and fury" quite well. Trump didn't want to spend the money, and tried hard not to spend the money. But they ended up spending the money. Because at the end of the day, Trump
is constrained:
N.I.H. looks very different. In the first six months of the year, N.I.H. spending was far behind its 2024 levels. There seemed to have been a decision made to withhold spending, to redirect spending, and I would argue, even to force a confrontation over impoundment — the president just ignoring Congress and not spending appropriated money on N.I.H. money.
Then in June or early July, you see a sudden acceleration of N.I.H. spending. Clearly, there was some decision made that the money had to go out the door by the end of the year.
They did that in a way that deformed or distorted some of that spending. They decided to spend multiyear money all in one year, on a broad range of federal grants, in order to be able to get the money out the door so that 100 percent of the appropriated amount would be spent by the end of the fiscal year.
That’s going to create problems down the road because with these multiyear grants, the institutions that receive them are not really equipped to spend them all in one year.
But in any case, a decision was made — I think it’s unavoidable, from looking at the numbers — to avoid an impoundment fight and to spend all the money. And by the end of the year, N.I.H. had spent 100 percent of its appropriated money for the year.
