Masters of Corruption by Mark Moyar
Professor Mark Moyar, who holds the William P. Harris Chair of Military History and is the director of Hillsdale’s Center for Military History and Strategy, has a new book coming out. Masters of Corruption is about Mark’s commendable efforts to hold the elected and unaccountable bureaucracy accountable. It is an important and timely book. It is also, occasionally, a discouraging book, though there is cause for hope in the knowledge that there are others like Mark who refuse to be silent and complicit in wrongdoing.
Mark is a man of wide and varied experience. He studied at Harvard and then joined up with the military before going on to teach other soldiers. At the Marine Corps University in Quantico, he taught young Marines about the virtues of courage, self-sacrifice, and hard work. All of these, along with strong leadership, are necessary ingredients to the Marine Corps’ legendary reputation and indomitable spirit. Sadly, these admirable qualities contrast sharply with the ethics and leadership that prevail in the federal bureaucracy. There, inefficiency and idleness combine with a commitment to leftist ideology, producing an entrenched and ineffective sea of career administrators. Even when liberals hold office, the quagmire of administrative agencies makes it difficult to effect real change. As Mark recounts, this difficulty is increased by several magnitudes when a Republican is elected.
As is well known, the entrenched bureaucracy had a vehement reaction to Donald Trump's election in 2016. It took to openly resisting President Trump, and his political appointees fared no better. Against vast numbers of hostile bureaucrats, Trump’s appointees had little hope of successfully implementing the administration’s policies. Mark describes this state of affairs as a tribalistic conflict, amounting to open insubordination against a duly elected president.
At the time, Mark held a senior position in the U.S. Agency for International Development. During his tenure, Mark attempted to expose several instances of corruption and inefficiency, discovering various instances of illegal censorship, blatant insubordination to White House policies, and numerous instances of fraud and abuse. For his efforts, Mark had several investigations opened against him. He was placed on administrative leave, followed by various legal maneuvers and procedural delays. His original allegations were investigated halfheartedly and inadequately. No evidence was gathered, and the government was cleared of any wrongdoing.
Injustices like these seem dishearteningly common. Holding the entrenched bureaucracy accountable will take a sustained effort on the part of Americans and their elected lawmakers alike. But before that can happen, we must rediscover through close study of America’s Founding documents the wisdom of the Founders. Doing so will both diagnose our ailments as well as provide us with the cure.
