In just a few months, the administration of US President Donald Trump has dismantled institutions, agencies and programmes.
The administration has taken dramatic steps to decrease the federal work force and withhold billions of dollars in research grants intended to address health and a range of other scientific concerns. It has eliminated foreign aid programmes and the entities that deliver them and disassembled governmental health institutions and programmes that provide health care and food to the poor and disabled.
It has upset international trade relations by imposing, then withdrawing, then reimposing tariffs. And it has created panic across the country with the expansion of immigration enforcement that has included the hiring thousands of unvetted people.
This is only a partial list.
A case can easily be made that reform was needed in many of these areas. It must be acknowledged that waste or redundancy is somewhat inevitable in programmes or agencies that have been in existence for decades or more. And there can be hesitancy to terminate programmes that have either outlived their usefulness or never had their intended effect. But needed reforms are always best done with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
By using the latter approach, the administration has damaged the government and risks eroding the public’s trust. The cutting of staff and research grants, and exaggerated claims made in denigrating them cannot easily be remedied by the next administration. Expertise has been lost in a number of areas and unmet needs will only multiply. Some elected officials will be hesitant to re-establish or provide funding for programmes that the administration has convinced a sizable number of voters are wasteful.
Look at some of what has been lost. By attempting to discredit the effectiveness of vaccines and shaking the public’s confidence in their importance, there could now be a resurgence in childhood diseases that had largely been eradicated.
According to a Harvard Health Publications report last week, close to 1,500 confirmed cases of measles – mostly among children – have been reported across 41 states. This isn’t the current administration’s doing, but its policies are unlikely to reverse the growing number of infections.
By eliminating programmes that provide food benefits to the poor, not only will they suffer, but America’s farmers who directly benefited from these efforts will also be hurt. Tariffs will make imported goods more expensive for American consumers and erode trust in the US as a reliable trading partner.
The resulting loss of US standing in many parts of the world has already led to some governments increasingly turn to China – as was evidenced in the number of leaders who attended the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation summit in Tianjin and the military parade in Beijing a few days later to commemorate Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Losses are evident, too, in setbacks in scientific research, the ability to predict weather conditions and patterns, and the damage done to efforts to meet climate change goals.
When this ends, America will be left with the monumental task of rebuilding.
While Mr Trump’s disruptive impact has been mainly felt domestically, it calls to mind the approach former US president George W Bush used in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the nightmare of the 9/11 terror attacks, the Bush administration lost control of its policymaking to a collection of neo-conservative ideologues both inside and outside the administration.
Convinced that reforming or tweaking the problems that existed in the Middle East would never get to the root of the problems, they chose to apply the wrecking ball to the region. They were going to dismantle and then rebuild “the new Middle East”.
The Bush policy was based on ideology, not reality. They were going to remove then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, install a government that met US criteria and, as they so poetically put it, “serve as a beacon of democracy that would light the entire Middle East”. When it became clear that none of this worked, they latched on to the term “constructive chaos” to explain the “logic” behind their Middle East foreign policy.
It was an effort to convince Americans that the mess they had created was intentional and necessary, and that the growing violence and instability that followed were merely the “birth pangs” of the “new Middle East” that they were helping usher into existence. But there was no “logic”, and nothing “constructive” about the “chaos”. The spawn of the “birth pangs” were ISIS, an emboldened Iran and weakened Arab republics, all of which destabilised the region.
We are now almost eight months into the “constructive chaos” engineered by the current US administration. The effect is enormous and could take a generation or more to reverse. At this point, the administration hasn’t felt the need to fashion a clever explanation for what they have done. In part, that is because the impact of the damage is just beginning to be felt and much of Mr Trump’s "Make America Great Again" base is still under his sway and continues to believe that the mess they see is not real or will easily be fixed in short order.
However, as was the case during the Bush years, reality will ultimately rear its head; questions will be asked, and fingers will be pointed. Then the process of rebuilding can begin. It will take time to reconstruct what has been destroyed and to regain the trust that has been lost. But it can be done.
