The Law of the Bureaucrat is simple: “The Bureaucrat is the smartest person in the room.”

This Law has a huge impact on everyday life and, if fully understood, will make it clear that we must clean out all the Federal bureaucracies. Further, it demonstrates why Anthony Fauci felt free to pursue gain of function research in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And finally, it explains why he feels free to completely dismiss any criticism of his actions. Let’s break it down.

Congress passes lots of laws. But Congress has no interest in actually dealing with the details. Congresspeople love to paint with a broad brush and say they’ve “helped you” by passing a multi-thousand-page act with a wonderful-sounding title. How to implement it is too much trouble for such important people. Instead, they hand it off to a bureaucratic agency. Or, if they are “[f]aced with a problem, be it real or imagined, that stirs voters, politicians propose new programs to solve the problem.”

Congress (and this applies at many lower levels as well) simply isn’t smart enough to give bureaucrats adequate direction. “Formulating rules now often requires bureaucrats specializing in finance, economics, statistics, and numerous fields of science.” Imagine Alexandria Airhead Cortez explaining to the CDC how it should “control” diseases. Of course, diseases cannot be “controlled.” Whatever doctors do simply helps your God-given mechanisms do the work. (ICYMI, I am a doctor.)

The Supreme Court has blessed this situation, codifying the Law of the Bureaucrat in Chevron and Auer, anointing them with the divine authority of the ultimate expert. This has created the Fourth Branch of Government, one that does not exist in the Constitution.

Fauci came into being not so much by his birthing person, but by Congress’s doddering inaction which ultimately anointed him the “Virus Czar” at NIAID. Congress declared that the Federal Government should be involved in virus research, and then declared Fauci the smartest person in the room so Congresspeople wouldn’t have to be bothered with any details. This gave him free rein to go anywhere and do anything he wanted.

By definition, a bureaucrat is infallible. This corollary of the Law became Fauci’s first hit parade. Early on he trotted out a theory that the AIDS virus could be airborne, causing a pandemic. UPI trumpeted his unsubstantiated speculation, as did the New York Times. Neonatal AIDS led to a huge scare and, again, Fauci was a hero. His amazing intellect would guide us. The fact that he hadn’t read the paper with his name on it in the Journal of the American Medical Association was lost. HIV was actually transmitted by blood across the placenta, not in the air or by casual contact.

Two months later, Fauci reversed course, although never admitting his error. After all, as the smartest man in the room, he could not make possibly be mistaken! When you tracked down his public statements, most of them were couched in “fuzzy” language, making it hard to pin down what he had actually said. But he sounded so authoritative saying it.

Ebola gave him a second chance at the brass ring. Remdesivir, his pet project, looked promising, but ultimately failed to halt the disease. Excellent supportive care allowed a handful of victims to recover, while the deadly course of the disease in Africa killed its victims too quickly to allow it to spread. Then came COVID-19. But this story is a bit more complicated.

Remember that Fauci, as a Bureaucrat, is the smartest person in the room. He was hired to solve the problem of viral diseases. He is unable to make the mistakes we mortals make. But if by some unfortunate miracle, he actually found the secret cure for viral diseases, he’d be out of a job. No bureaucrat can survive that.

Since bureaucrats can never actually solve the problem they’re handed, Fauci, with his buddy Peter Daszak, started engineering new viruses. There wasn’t enough fun or glory in simply dealing with the existing bugs. We know this activity started as early as 2012, and Fauci was explicit in his emails that he might create a bug that would kill millions, but he really didn’t care. He was too far above us, and “science” was too important.

The Patron Saint of Wuhan could not be thwarted. When gain of function research was officially halted in 2014, he looked for ways around it and, in December 2017, found it in a footnote to the rule. There was a national security exception, and “science” was obviously (to him, and no one else mattered) a national security issue. As the smartest man in the room, the decision was his to make.

Since “Lord Fauci Is Science,” our Dear Leader’s word is the same as God’s. But there are pesky investigators out there who might discover his nefarious plot. Videos did get out but, fortunately, no one noticed their import. And the Regent of Remdesivir could not get his fingers dirty. Instead, he funneled money through Peter Daszak at the EcoHealth alliance, offshoring millions to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where no prying American eyes would be allowed.

When the pandemic hit, Fauci was ready. He had multiple pronouncements on what we should and should not do. Since the virus was new, old drugs (think: HCQ) couldn’t possibly be useful, so he actively worked against them, likely killing thousands. But as the smartest person in the room, he could not be questioned. If someone died, it was because his prescription hadn’t been perfectly followed, not because he blocked an effective prescription. After all, no one could possibly be as smart as he is.

Masks, lockdowns, and the like were blithely “recommended” while extensive data showing those measures were uniformly harmful were ignored. When they caused great harm, the CDC, in lockstep with Fauci, commanded a moratorium on tenant evictions, creating new harm for landlords.

As the highest-paid employee in the Federal Government, there was little of pecuniary interest left for Fauci. But fame was a new currency, the ultimate aphrodisiac for a bureaucrat. COVID-19, when Fauci mismanaged it, was his ticket to a most exhilarating extended orgasm. The little people did not matter.

By now, I think it is very clear that establishing bureaucracies to fill in the blanks Congress leaves behind is an extremely bad thing. The Law of the Bureaucrat corrupts people who might start out as worthy into mavens of destruction, unaccountable to anyone because they are the smartest people in the room. Any failures in their arena are never theirs but fall on you because you did not perfectly follow their prescriptions. Flip flops on their part are simply you misunderstanding what they commanded in the beginning. And on….

But we can push Congress to pass the Write the Laws Act. Meanwhile, perhaps the Supreme Court will revisit Chevron and Auer. Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have written that this is overdue.

Fauci is the quintessential bureaucrat. He plays a doctor on TV because that suits his objectives. And he is criminally responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. When will a State Attorney General grow the brass ones required to charge him with complicity in those murders?

Ted Noel MD writes and posts as DoctorTed and @VidZette.

IMAGE: A thank-you to Fauci as the “teller of truth” by Tyler Merbler. CC BY 2.0.

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