It probably started before Ronald Reagan, but Reagan (or his speech writer, unaware of the law of unintended consequences) was the first to unequivocally publicly state it.

“Government,” he declared in his first inaugural address, “is not the solution … government is the problem.”

He followed that with some caveats and modifications, but it was already too late. The catchy slogan instantly infected a large portion of the public consciousness. Most people thought it was simply about cutting taxes, but it is a short step from “problem” to “enemy.” Few were those who were willing to admit the possibility that what Reagan had proposed was a formula for national self-destruction.

By 2001, this unacknowledged malignancy had metastasized. In an NPR interview, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist remarked that he didn’t want to abolish government but “reduce it to a size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

In 2017, Steve Bannon was tolling government’s death knell with a more refined formula. He called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” He confuses (perhaps intentionally) “deconstruction” — a philosophical, critical, analytical method — with deconstructing or deconstruct, which also means to destroy, demolish; and this is what we’re seeing.

The mission is to demolish the current government and, with it, the economy and all the support systems that protect ordinary people. The president is mainly a tool through which this end may be accomplished. It has nothing to do with making government work better for the governed. If improvement was the goal, the changes we’re seeing would proceed in a cautious, orderly manner, not as a frenzied smash-fest. But that’s what we’re getting: a demolition that will harm everyone who is not so rich, powerful or privileged that no damage can touch them.

Here’s where it becomes personal. In the late 1950s, my microbiologist mother began work in the laboratory on the old Trudeau Sanatorium grounds. In 1962, she was offered a position in a lab at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Baltimore where she continued the work she’d been doing here on drug resistant tuberculosis. Though her salary came through the VA, the actual research was grant supported, primarily by NIH and CDC. They were competitive grants, but the research that my mother did was important enough that it was funded for many years. This was and is noble work in which scientists combat the “world’s deadliest infectious disease.”

Under the current regime, the sciences are taking a major hit. Scientists are not as widely respected as they were 50 years ago. The huge improvements they’ve made in quality of life are taken for granted while the “inconvenient” truths they deliver are resented or denied and the real-time reversals in messaging (because learning is a fluid process) provoke confusion and anger in millions of Americans who don’t understand the scientific method — an incremental pursuit: knowledge building on knowledge, results upon results. Some experiments take years to bear fruit, and sometimes the fruit is negative, but the overall movement is forward.

The people who are dragging us backward in the name of “efficiency” by pulling funding and firing people are paragons of efficiency’s opposite. They are wasting money by interrupting and thus invalidating experiments and trials that require much time and stringent controls to produce reliable results. They are trashing the progress those results may have yielded and jeopardizing the lives that might have been spared and wasting our nation’s investment in the future, all the while sneering at the people who made their lives and the lives of people everywhere better than they would otherwise have been.

Whether it be neutering environmental protections that prevent our rivers from catching fire as they once did or deadly smogs from threatening entire cities, or defunding research in labs like my mother’s where people battle invisible but no less deadly foes, these slash and burn tactics have nothing to do with efficiency or any kind of improvement. They are vandalism on a massive scale.

Bannon’s longed-for deconstruction is well underway with the wrecking of the federal workforce. And, as though being Musked wasn’t demoralizing enough, MAGA cheerleaders in Congress are trying to stamp out whatever sympathy the public may have for the now federally unemployed. Leading this mob is Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Congresswoman from northwest Georgia, who has said: “Those are not real jobs producing real revenue… those jobs are paid for by … people who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes and then pay these federal employees … Federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks.”

The level of willful ignorance and disrespect in these remarks is breathtaking. The Congresswoman’s purposefully simpleminded formulations are designed to mislead and enrage her constituents and further stoke enmity among the MAGA faithful, denying the fact that those constituents rely almost every day on the work of the federal employees she so maligns, not to mention that she herself and her staff are also federal employees funded by the taxpayers.

My mother was smart, quick of tongue and sharp as a razor when it came to cutting the pompous down to size. She despised bullies and blowhards, and she brooked no disrespect. She, too, was a federal employee. The Congresswoman from northwest Georgia wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with her.

In 1886, on Rabbit Island in Spitfire Lake near Paul Smiths, Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau conducted his pivotal experiment to understand and cure tuberculosis. To my knowledge, in all the years since, no nation, organization or individual has deliberately taken action to help the tubercle bacillus do its deadly work … until now.

As though 1,250,000 deaths annually is not enough, the United States has terminated a global tuberculosis prevention program and has “halted … funded trials.” Interrupting treatment invites increasingly drug resistant strains of TB.

Do the dead turn in their graves when something nefarious is afoot? My Mother is spinning in hers.

——

Phil Gallos lives in Saranac Lake.