While You Were Gawking

For the past couple of days,* many people have, understandably, been absorbed in the fun of watching two ostensibly grown men acting like infants on social media. (As Nick Catoggio writes, "It was a fun day. Are you not entertained?"). One hopes that at least some of that audience has focused specifically on the obvious dictatorial impulses of one of those men, who happens to be president of the United States, as he casually and corruptly threatens--yet again, only this time not through lackeys at the Department of Education--to use ostensible executive power to punish someone who has wounded his ego. Even at such times, it is perhaps worth remembering other things. For instance: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is still the Secretary of Human Services.

It's a little thing, I know. But on any given day, while we understandably focus on the president's personal corruption and authoritarianism, it is also the case that entire agencies are busily doing stupid and dangerous things more or less under the radar. As a general rule of thumb, the executive branch agencies in the present regime are likely to act in an especially egregious fashion when one of two conditions applies: 1) When President Trump takes a personal interest in the agency, and 2) when he shows no interest in it at all. In the case of HHS, it seems to be more the latter.

I'm going to go into some detail here on one example provided the other day by the Wall Street Journal, whose reporting on the regime has been superb. It brings us an update on David Geier, who I have mentioned before. Geier is busy seeking access to CDC data so he can "prove" that a) vaccines cause autism and b) the CDC covered it all up. The detail is worth it in part for the sake of fairness and in part because the things Kennedy is doing to the HHS and to domestic and international health and disease policy always deserve the attention. (I like to think of Kennedy as aiming for the top spot on the list of leading causes of death in the United States, as if it's a prize.) Of course--and this is the larger reason for the post, although any given scandal is worth noting for its own sake--it's just one of innumerable daily instances of the dangerous, incompetent, and corrupt ways in which our government is being conducted at the middle and bottom while we are entranced by the spectacle of corruption and incompetence at the top. 

Kennedy himself is, of course, a walking, bear-cub-dumping refutation of the "lawyer as astrophysicist" myth (except for this guy, I guess). His training in American history and literature easily equips him to question the germ theory consensus on disease in favor of a clumsy form of Béchamp revivalism. His apparent view is that a conflict of interest is shocking if it involves working with the actual makers of drugs and vaccines but a mere professional courtesy if it involves suing them, selling basil seed supplements, or acting as TikTok snake-oil vendors. Still, with his continued championing of Geier, a kind of Thomas Fugate avant la lettre figure in his lack of qualifications, Kennedy really hit the jackpot.

You may recall that, armed with a whole entire undergraduate degree in biology and some grad school classes, David Geier was found to have examined (underage) patients, ordered blood work, and otherwise aided his doctor father, Mark Geier, as he recommended that minor patients be injected with Lupron--a drug used, inter alia, to suppress testosterone development and for chemical castration--to "treat" autism. For this, Geier fils was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license; see also 2015 WL 5921325. (Geier père's license to practice medicine was stripped or suspended in multiple states. Mark Geier died in March of this year, fortuitously rendering him ineligible for the post of Surgeon General.) 

At a Senate hearing in mid-May, Kennedy denied reports that Geier, as initially rumored, was actually heading up his predetermined "study" of the "causes" of autism. (In doing so, Kenndy accused Sen. Maggie Hassan, the senator who was grilling him, of spreading defamatory lies. She did get some things slightly wrong, but not the ones he was complaining about. Kennedy being Kennedy, he then proceeded to baldly misrepresent the facts concerning Geier and related litigation. It is always worth remembering that if Kennedy is testifying before the Senate and his lips are moving, he may be lying and is probably wrong.) Rather, Kennedy said, Geier had been "hired by an independent contractor[,] not as an HHS employee," to go through nonpublic vaccine research data to see if the data conformed with what he and his late father had seen on earlier visits. (Geier actually shows up in the HHS employee database not as an independent contractor but as a "senior data analyst.")

How did they get access, if the data was nonpublic? In Kennedy's version, because "[t]he Congress ordered CDC to open it to the Geiers." Another way to put it: Because of pressure from former congressman Dr. Dave Weldon--most recently an abortive nominee for director of the CDC, and a man with a long record of anti-vaccine advocacy, including parroting Kennedy's favorite claims about vaccines and autism.

And how did their earlier visit go? Not great. This letter from HHS to the institutional review board that had approved the Geiers' proposed 2004 study involving VRD data information details the problems, including misrepresenting their plans for the data and accidentally or intentionally attempting to take the data with them without permission. (At least this IRB, unlike one board the Geiers used during their Lupron frolic, didn't consist of "Mark and David Geier; Dr Geier's wife; two of Dr Geier's business associates; and two mothers of autistic children, one of whom has publicly acknowledged that her son is a patient/subject of Dr Geier, and the other of whom is plaintiff in three pending vaccine injury claims.") Things went no better when they returned in 2006 and again violated the terms of the protocol for their data-gathering, possibly through deception.

I suppose the easiest way to make sure someone isn't abusing his access to data is to just hire him so you don't have to think about the details. But it doesn't seem the best way to do it. Nevertheless, it is exactly what Kennedy, and by extension Trump, have done. This NBC piece on Geier puts the point well, in a way that suggests once again the basic theme of the entire second Trump regime: "[W]ith Kennedy at the helm of HHS and Geier working for him, there are no roadblocks left."  

There is nothing unique about this story, except insofar as basically every presidential administration--until now--has generally done its best to keep this agency and especially its major departments run on a professional footing and not have them overseen by rogues. But days of Trump-madness, or even of relative quiet, can go by while one simply forgets that this president deliberately placed domestic and global health policy in the hands of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.--someone who is not only unqualified to steward them by virtue of experience, temperament, and dishonesty, but positively believes stupid and harmful things. Sen. Hassan got some details wrong, but not this: She is right that Geier "has directly endangered the lives of children" and "does not belong at a government agency that oversees the health of more than 70 million American children." One must surely say the same thing about Kennedy himself.

One tries, in enduring and evaluating this regime, to distinguish between matters of ordinary politics and policy in which, however much I disagree with the policy and the politics, they are only awful, not awful and unlawful, awful and corrupt, or awful and dictatorial. All of these things are worth discussing, but I prefer to avoid characterizing the first category as if it is novel, or as if it is dangerous to democracy; there are enough examples of conduct that falls into the latter categories. I didn't write every time I found a Biden (or Trump I) policy stupid, although I often did. (This is not, however, the same as writing a good deal, in a generalist way, about federal and constitutional law in spaces like this and never talking about current policy and politics--one might say, deliberately avoiding any such discussion, like a lawyer who busily absorbs himself in mastering new corporate transactional practices--in Germany, in the early 1930s. Especially in the case of this evidently and deliberately dangerous regime, that's neither prudence nor specialization: it's a form of cowardice and moral failure.)

The cumulative failures of competence in this regime, its frequent corruption, the ways in which even matters of ordinary politics are folded into utterly extraordinary and starkly personalist and authoritarian conduct, and the ultimate near-impossibility of distinguishing among and between these categories when the executive branch is so frequently committed to bullshitting, and combines extreme garrulousness with a profound lack of transparency, make this approach challenging, to say the least. Moreover, because one train wreck is always followed by four more on the same day, the sheer volume means that if you're going to offer an attempt to fully and fairly describe each dereliction, you will be permanently behind. And that extra effort is valuable if a) you want to be fair-minded, b) you think tweet- and slogan-level politics, however standard, is asinine and degrading, and c) you want to distinguish between ordinary bad politics and unusually bad, corrupt, or unlawful politics. It is fair to say that if you don't care too much about law or guardrails, care very little about results, and care not at all about separation of powers, it's easy for the regime to keep up that pace and hard for citizen-critics to keep up with it.

But it's worth the occasional reminder of something like the sheer fact of Kennedy, or this particular item about Geier, because it is simply what goes on, in surely unprecedented volume, in every department on every day. The presidential bread and circuses (minus the bread, to be sure) are easy enough to track, and Trump, who is basically a Quantum Lichen Person, would be disappointed if you didn't. I followed it, if only for all the awesome, subliterately Riefenstahl-esque homoeroticism of Trump's more fervent fans. But it's worth sparing a thought for all the ordinary acts of governmental vandalism, corruption, and insanity that are quietly committed by hundreds upon hundreds of Trump regime officials every day, from the David Geiers to the even-worse-than-Geiers. All of which, to be sure, should on this regime's legal theory be treated by supporters and critics alike as if they had been committed by Donald Trump personally.

* Of course this was written before the latest conflagration. And this rather goes to demonstrate the points made here: that a) keeping up with the enormity of the regime is a challenge, especially if one wants to do so in a detailed and not a drive-by or tweetish fashion; and b) the Trumpian Sturm und Drang should not detract from everything that his surrogates--which is to say, the entire executive branch--are doing every day to worsen the nation.