America’s four-year Weekend at Brandon’s is over. Now the clean-up and heavy lifting begin.
If confirmed by the U.S. senate to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem should make her first task to purge the spy network of the leadership that routinely ignores genuine terror threats and instead chooses softer, easier targets to investigate and surveil, including innocent Americans for things like posting conservative memes and satire online, praying in public, and voicing concerns at school board meetings about curricula.
Similarly, DHS’s misconceived stepchild and sub-agency CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) needs to be dramatically culled, if not abolished outright. CISA’s sole objective is to censor truthful information that the federal government doesn’t want the public to know about and to get rich while doing it.
According to DHS’s own website, CISA’s budget nearly doubled in the four years between 2020 and 2024. With cringe-inducing grandiosity, outgoing CISA director Jen Easterly maintains that CISA’s rapidly metastasizing mission is to protect Americans’ “cognitive infrastructure.”
Ah, yes. CISA aims to safeguard our “cognitive infrastructure” by insisting, for example, that CISA does not censor and blacklist by proxy; that bogus FBI crime statistics are real; that inflation, budget deficits, and gasoline prices came down under Biden; that you are a Putin-lover and a Russian “asset” if you question the wisdom of America’s deepening involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war; that the bioengineered COVID virus came not from a lab, but from nature; and that mRNA vaccines are safe and effective and have no side-effects (and you’re a MAGA-loving racist who should be scrutinized by the FBI if you insinuate otherwise).
The irony is that if CISA truly lived up to its own declaration of intent, it would declare itself a reckless purveyor of disinformation and outright lies and would voluntarily shut down and disband.
Republicans are far from blameless here. Let us not forget that DHS was created under the auspices of the George W. Bush administration, and CISA was birthed under Trump 45 in 2018.
Given the fact that the rank-and-file Baghdad Bobs and Pravda devotees of DHS and CISA won’t resign voluntarily, every last one of them needs to be strongly encouraged to seek out an honest living in the private sector.
Similarly, legacy intelligence agencies like the FBI and CIA appear to be totally unreformable, even for newly designated leaders like MAGA mega-fauna Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, and Devin Nunes. Thus, the task is to seek out ways to limit the damage these agencies do.
Given institutional capture and the ideological makeup of these agencies (both leadership and rank-and-file personnel), efforts to revamp or tweak them are beyond quixotic, hence the need to reduce salaries and budgets, lay off personnel, and cut as many superfluous programs as possible.
Although a pitifully small number of whistleblowers from these agencies bravely testified to Jim Jordan’s Weaponization of Government (congressional) subcommittee about serial unconstitutional abuses of conservative citizens (and faced government retaliation for their honesty), the fact that so few whistleblowers from these agencies surfaced over the past ten years is prima facie evidence that those agencies are likely beyond reform.
In crudely reductive terms, ideologically speaking, virtually every spook of the CIA might as well be John Brennan, every NSA spy Michael “American Christians are not at all different from Hamas terrorists” Hayden, every FBI agent James Comey, and every CISA employee Nina Jankowicz (the Mary Poppins nutcase).
Such people and the government fiefdoms they lead are as monumentally partisan as they are corrupt, and they will not change their ways. If these departments cannot be abolished outright, they need to be completely reimagined, their budgets slashed to the bone, and their mission statements and jurisdictions (always expanding due to mission creep) dramatically reduced, with as many personnel as possible pink-slipped.
No government bureaucrat living high off the taxpayer teat wants anything to change. The selfless, altruistic civil servant toiling for the common good is a Pollyanna portrait of federal government employment.
The truth is that most civil self-servants are progressive class snobs in it for the easy money and the Club Fed lifestyle. Mediocrities and worse “fail up” in government, with promotions and COLA (cost of living adjustment) increases, more paid vacation, more sick leave, “working” remotely from home, with huge pensions and early retirement if they wish — all paid for by the demonized non-government taxpayer. Civil servants don’t serve you; you toil for them.
Even beyond the Intelligence Community, government employees are a protected class, facing little or no accountability for their actions. With thousands of public school teachers grooming and molesting their students, the Department of Education says no big deal, “pass the trash,” and claims that $36,000 in taxpayer money per student per school year in New York City is “not enough.”
It is never enough. Progressives believe that bigger government with ever more money for government employees is the solution to every problem.
Unfortunately, with the departure of Vivek Ramaswamy, DOGE (the Dept. of Government Efficiency) is now managing expectations downward, scaling back its advertised ambitious reform agenda. DOGE will ultimately issue recommendations, not mandates, to Congress. Congress and Cabinet heads need to implement those recommendations quickly, before political inertia sets in, and then press for even deeper cuts to government.
Failing to deliver will likely result in GOP losses in the 2026 midterms, with a resurgent Deep State backed by a new Democrat majority in Congress and DOGE’s efforts coming to naught.
Additionally, it’s no secret that many congressional Republicans understandably fear the power of the intelligence agencies and the administrative state every bit as much as the Democrat party reveres and rewards the omnipotence of the Administrative (Deep) State.
Thus, some GOP geldings (they bristle at the term RINOs) will inevitably try to curry favor with the DOJ, FBI, CIA, news media, et al. by resisting any reforms proposed by DOGE or the Trump administration.
The media will then lionize these “brave” Republican eunuchs, and they will be feted the same way John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Liz Cheney were for their cowardly betrayals of conservatives and ideals about limited government.
The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. Democrats and their voters want an all-powerful, micromanaging government that occupies a central place in your life, seizing half or more of your income for itself while providing you with declining (if any) services, and vilifying you if you object in any way, perhaps harassing you with censorship, surveillance, blacklisting, de-banking, lawfare, tax audits, social ostracism, and other ritualized abuse if you dare to get out of line.
Decades of marching through the institutions, staffing government with millions of committed progressives whose tenure continues uninterrupted through presidential administrations of both political parties (progressive personnel is progressive policy), have brought America to the precipice of social, economic, and moral ruin.
The GOP congress and Cabinet heads urgently need to work together with — rather than obstruct — DOGE and Trump 2.0. These are early days for the Trump 47 agenda, but the clock is already ticking.
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