Six years after the covid pandemic and nearly two years after he was pardoned for any and all crimes he may have committed since 2014 relating to his role at HHS, Anthony Fauci was back in the news last week.
The former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was called to testify before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, where he made news for pleading the Fifth Amendment 111 times. But the real headlines came from the over one thousand pages of Fauci’s “diary” entries released by Senator Rand Paul before the proceedings.
Fauci’s “personal diary” was really a long digital document where he would write up a summary of his workday every night to help inform his post-retirement memoir and any sympathetic future biographers. The release provided some new details on the nature of the government’s response to the pandemic and, to an even greater extent, exposed the mentality of the bureaucrat who quickly emerged as the public face of it all.
These insights are instructive because, perhaps more than any other government official in recent years, the career of Anthony Fauci can teach us a lot about where power actually resides in America and how our system really works.
So, with Fauci’s name back on the news and some new details from his diary in hand, here are five important lessons that Fauci has done much to exemplify.
Bureaucrats Hold the Power
In American politics, elected politicians get almost all the attention. This isn’t surprising. They are some of the loudest, most obnoxious personalities in government. And they have to spend much of their career campaigning directly to the general population for votes.
But, even more importantly, the democratic process lies at the core of how the American government legitimizes its perceived power over all of us.
The creation myth of the current American regime begins, of course, with the colonies revolting and seceding from Britain. But the specific simplistic version the establishment always pushes, and that most of us were taught in government- or government-accredited schools, emphasizes the colonial opposition to taxation without representation.
That emphasis implies that the issue has been totally resolved for good, because now we are taxed and governed by officials who represent us, the people. Never mind that this government taxes us and tramples on our rights at levels no king could ever have gotten away with back then. We live in a democracy now, so it’s fine.
The ruling class needs to keep this perception up to preserve its legitimacy. But the mask often slips, especially during crises.
The narrative that the American government is, above all, run by our representatives did not stand up well when a public health bureaucracy with an unelected, career bureaucrat as its public face effectively ran the government’s pandemic response.
The narrative may have held at the beginning when virtually all politicians were aligned behind them. But, as more and more elected representatives began pushing back, Fauci and the bureaucracy he helped oversee went to war with those governors and representatives in public and behind the scenes with the full, enthusiastic support of the political establishment.
This wasn’t an unprecedented departure from the status quo, but a peek behind the curtain at the true power structure in Washington, DC. Since the late 1800s, the unelected federal bureaucracy has exploded in size and, most importantly, secured legal immunity from the changing attitudes of voters.
Today, the bulk of federal power lies, not with our representatives, but with millions of government officials who control the actual administrative functions of the federal government and who remain in their roles regardless of who voters send to Capitol Hill or the White House. Anthony Fauci was the epitome of this kind of faceless, permanent official. He just happened to be thrust into the limelight at the end of his career.
One could argue that some issues are too important or some crises are too dire to be left up to the whims of public opinion. And that’s perfectly reasonable. But if a system only gives the elected representatives the final, unquestioned say when an issue is unimportant enough or a situation is trivial enough, then that is not a representative government.
That said, it is also not accurate to frame Fauci or the rest of the federal bureaucracy as “experts” genuinely trying to keep us safe or financially secure, which brings us to the next lesson.
The Federal Bureaucrat’s Job Isn’t to Solve Our Problems, but to Enrich and Empower the Rest of the Political Class
For nearly his entire career, Fauci’s job has, on paper, been the same: assess the danger of emerging infectious diseases, advise policymakers on the appropriate response, and oversee the administrative components of much of that response.
But what quickly becomes clear if you look at his whole career is how abysmal he was at that.
Early on, he was criticized heavily by the public for bungling the response to the AIDS epidemic. But even when it came to the lower-profile cases, Fauci would repeatedly make wildly inaccurate projections about the danger posed by a new illness. Those warnings would prompt huge transfers of taxpayer dollars to the bureaucracy he helped oversee and the well-connected pharmaceutical companies who would dutifully rush to develop a new vaccine or treatment.
The most egregious examples before covid were a strain of swine flu in the 1970s, a bird flu strain in 2005, another swine flu in 2009, and the 2016 Zika virus.
Over and over again, the actual danger proved to be far more limited than he had been warning about, even before the government response could be mobilized. Yet, the tax dollars would still go on to be transferred, the public health bureaucracy’s power would expand, and Big Pharma would enjoy a sizable revenue boost.
If Fauci’s role were truly to pass on the risk of infectious diseases in a manner accurate enough to facilitate the prudent allocation of public funds, he would almost certainly have been pushed out decades ago.
The fact that he not only remained in his position for so long, but was treated with an almost preposterous level of admiration and gratitude from the rest of the political class suggests that the true purpose he was serving was different.
The most plausible explanation is that his true role was to move as much money to the federal bureaucracy and well-connected companies as he could. And, indeed, if you take an honest look at the origins of the entire administrative state, it becomes clear that this has always been the purpose of these federal agencies. Everything from the FDA to the Federal Reserve was created—not by some unenthusiastic government officials who reluctantly gave themselves more power over the economy to answer the people’s demands for more regulations—but to help the well-connected, established firms secure their market dominance and hinder future competitors.
Whether they were the genuine mistakes of a bad scientist or the deliberate exaggerations of a clear-eyed power player, Fauci’s exaggerated projections helped move a lot of money to the federal bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical industry.
And he was clearly well compensated for that. At the end of his career, Fauci was the highest-paid government employee. And upon retiring, the self-described “public servant” had a net worth of over $11 million.
However, as we can see from his newly-released diary entries…
Money Is Not the Only Motivation for Bureaucrats; Fame and Power Are Ends in Themselves
It is immediately clear from Fauci’s own recollection of his day-to-day life that he is obsessed with his own public image. He spent a lot of time writing out, in detail, all the compliments and praise he received—especially from famous or important people.
When we talk about corruption or bribery or, more accurately, the quid-pro-quos between government and special interests that define our crony, corporatist system, it is easy to focus exclusively on the wealth being transferred between groups.
But the fact is, for a lot of people, things like perceived authority, respect and adulation from the legacy media and general public, access or even friendship with the biggest names in the country, or even just raw political power itself can be even more enticing than a paycheck.
Fauci was absolutely driven by this kind of thing. His diary reveals a man reveling in the praise he was getting from the public, gleeful about A-list celebrities reaching out or mentioning him, and, above all, ecstatic about being seen as the national authority on all things “science” during the biggest global pandemic in over a century.
And that last point is important to dig into a bit more, because the fact is:
The Modern State Uses “Science” for Legitimacy
As I mentioned above, the way we’re taught to view the American Revolution as a glorious and totally justified revolt while viewing any case for another revolution as preposterous, deeply immoral, and worthy of the death penalty is to focus on the representation side of a colonist demand. Because that helps delegitimize the state the colonists seceded from while legitimizing the state we currently live under.
However, as Murray Rothbard laid out in Anatomy of the State, the narratives and ideas that give states legitimacy in the minds of a sufficient portion of the population are so crucial for a state’s existence that they really cannot afford to rely on only one—especially as the state changes and grows into new forms over time.
As the US government has shifted from a union of states governed primarily by a small group of elected politicians to a single super-state controlled by a massive class of unelected bureaucrats, a new excuse for this expansion of state power was required. And, as Rothbard put it, in our more secular age, the state found that with the invocation of a new god, Science.
In his words:
State rule is now proclaimed as being ultrascientific, as constituting planning by experts. . . . The increasing use of scientific jargon has permitted the State’s intellectuals to weave obscurantist apologia for State rule that would have only met with derision by the populace of a simpler age. A robber who justified his theft by saying that he really helped his victims, by his spending giving a boost to retail trade, would find few converts; but when this theory is clothed in Keynesian equations and impressive references to the “multiplier effect,” it unfortunately carries more conviction.
Anthony Fauci could well be the culmination of this phase of state apologia hiding behind the label of “science.” He perfectly embodied the simplistic, corrupted version of science—not a process for relentlessly attempting to disprove hypotheses, but a fixed body of knowledge discovered and approved by state-approved scholars that could never be questioned without severe social and professional costs.
To say you “believed in science” became a common way for establishment figures and progressives to virtue signal during the covid years. And Fauci came to represent the human face of this dogma. He even famously conflated criticisms of himself with criticisms of “science” in one of the more cartoonish moments of the pandemic.
However, it may have gone too far.
As the lockdowns stretched far beyond the initial fourteen days, public health officials reversed their guidance to sanction mass protests simply because they agreed with them politically, and it was becoming clear that the government was interested in only allowing people to get their rights back if they consumed a patented product from a well-connected pharmaceutical firm, public opposition to the government’s pandemic response was growing.
And, unsurprisingly, the man who was made the public face of that pandemic response bore the brunt of that anger, especially as he declared himself to be the embodiment of truth and science itself.
But that is where Fauci began to take on what could honestly be his most important role, because…
Bureaucrats Can Also Serve the Racket as Individual Scapegoats When People Get Upset with the Current System
The release of Fauci’s diary has further confirmed the true nature of his time leading the pandemic response that has emerged in the years since. Far from the noble, science-minded “public servant” who was solely concerned with the wellbeing of the public that many initially took him for, Fauci lied repeatedly to the public in ways that caused widespread harm.
He understood early on that the death rate of the virus was well below the scary initial estimates that were circulating in the early spring of 2020. Yet, he decided not to clarify that, and instead helped fuel the growing concern that would eventually result in the lockdowns, production halts, and school closures that swept across the nation in March.
Fauci then used his position to relentlessly push for the shutdowns to be extended far longer than the short period he had initially argued for. He put institutional pressure on governors and infectious disease specialists who did not go along with his program. And he marshaled the federal government’s entire public health bureaucracy to push for the production and/or dissemination of patented medications and treatments while blocking, banning, or demonizing cheap, generic treatments that had been showing positive initial results.
Even setting aside the very real possibility that Fauci had actually helped facilitate the illegal funding the risky gain-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan that could have caused the entire pandemic to happen in the first place, the economic cost of shutting everything down and only slowly reopening was staggering—especially when you factor in all the later inflation caused by the Fed printing over six trillion new dollars to push the inevitable economic pain down the road a bit.
But the full human cost of all the missed days at school, social get-togethers, workouts, family visits, doctors’ appointments, cancer screenings, funerals, everything—the full cost of all of that is impossible to calculate in its entirety, or even to fully comprehend. But it is extraordinary.
The fact that Fauci, the government official who spearheaded it all, was not reluctantly taking drastic steps only after he was certain there was no alternative but—as records now show—was actively looking for any excuse, any effective spin, to justify this unprecedented and destructive power grab because it sent money to the pharmaceutical industry, enhanced the status of his department and colleagues, and satisfied his personal desire to feel important is nothing short of a crime—a crime worthy of consequences.
But it is also important to remember that this was not Fauci corrupting what had been a sound public health bureaucracy, it was him effectively running a racket that he was momentarily given the reins of.
The focus on Fauci the man—while certainly justified to a significant extent—can also feed the impression that, had he been swapped out with some other official early on, the federal bureaucracy would have been working purely on behalf of the American people, and none of this damage would have occurred. That is wrong. But, more importantly, it is useful for keeping the racket going. If all the blame is aimed solely at Fauci and not the system he was operating within, then, regardless of whether he escapes any accountability or spends the rest of his life behind bars, he will have fulfilled his role.
Fauci is now, in fact, retired. But that racket he oversaw continues on—moving money and expanding federal power at whatever level the political class can get away with at the moment.
Holding him and the other individuals who oversaw the pandemic response accountable for what they did is necessary if we’re ever going to truly move on and prevent something like this from happening again. But that alone is not sufficient.
We must also roll back the legislation and regulations that empower all corners of the federal bureaucracy to rip us off and trample on our rights. That is and ought to be the main lesson this country learns from Anthony Fauci.
