Trump is deworming Washington now to keep the parasites out for good

Washington, DC, is riddled with parasites sucking the life out of our nation.Time for a thorough deworming.Jonathan Rauch, in a book by the same name, called it “demosclerosis.” Mancur Olson, in his classic “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” called it a “web of special interests.” I call it the “parasite class.” All refer to a collection of bureaucrats, lobbyists, contractors, nonprofits, non-governmental organizations and connected unions and corporations that have increasingly run our federal government for their own benefit, fattening themselves with the help of diverted taxpayer dollars.I confess that until recently, I assumed nothing could be done about these problems until an unmistakable financial collapse took place, forcing massive slashes in spending and regulation of the sort that we’ve seen in Argentina under Javier Milei.  The situation was desperate, but no one was serious about dealing with it.That has all changed now. The Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency are making some of the cuts that it would be forced to make in the event of a financial collapse — ahead of the collapse.  This has made the parasites unhappy, and there has been much squealing. DOGE’s audit of the United States Agency for International Development demonstrated what others, such as a 2022 Foreign Policy report, had indicated: Most of the money went to feed the Beltway Blob, not to help poor people in foreign countries.In many cases, the recipients were NGOs that used the money for political purposes.Years ago I wrote that one of the benefits of democratic elections was to ensure turnover in the elected government, disrupting the web of special-interest connections. But over time, the bureaucracy itself became part of the ruling class, connecting itself to foundations, nonprofits, academia and the like.That made it immune to elections as part of an enormous unelected power structure.President Donald Trump’s second term...