Perhaps never in American history have unelected technocrats played such a huge role in shaping American public policy.
In the past few weeks, Congressmen have disappeared from view. Late last month, the House of Representatives approved the largest ever government spending. During the voting, most of the Congressmen were absent. The MPs' votes were not registered and legislation was passed by vote by vote, requiring only a tiny handful of MPs to participate. (This is how the Congress website describes this type of voting: “voting by vote occurs when members of Congress answer“yes”or“no”, when the speaker asks a question. The speaker says:“Which of you supports the decision, say “yes.” Then the speaker asks: “Who is against, say“no.”Sometimes it is difficult for the speaker to determine by the volume of each answer, whether the legislators shouted“yes”or“no.”Considering that the question was adopted by unanimous consent,the speaker can simply say “no objection, the question is accepted” instead of voting. Nevertheless, any congressman can object to this and force him to vote - approx. ed.)
A few weeks later, it turns out that the Senate is also not going to open sessions and intends to consider some legislative issues only in May. As in the case of the House, several senators did meet to approve another huge stimulus bill. Many senators stayed at home. This is "representative government" in America today.
But if you thought that the absence of members of Congress in the workplace means that little is happening in Washington in terms of policy making, you would be very wrong. It's just that democratically elected institutions have now become a largely irrelevant sideshow. Real policy-making takes place among unelected experts who decide for themselves - with minimal involvement and oversight by de facto elected officials - what government policy will be. The people who really run the country are the experts and bureaucrats at central banks, public health authorities, intelligence agencies, and an ever-expanding network of councils and commissions.
The rise of technocracy
This is by no means a new trend. Over the past several decades - and especially since the New Deal - official experts in government have gradually replaced elected representatives as key decision-makers in government. Public debate was dropped in favor of small group meetings of technocrats. Politics has been replaced by “science,” whether social or natural sciences. The influence of these largely unaccountable individuals today is most evident in federal courts, in “intelligence agencies,” in the Federal Reserve and, for a long time, ignored in government public health authorities.
Technocracy as a style of government has existed since at least the Progressive Era, although it has often been constrained by traditional elected political actors and institutions. Technocracy has manifested itself at different times in different countries, for example, in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s.
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But the power of technocracy has long been growing in the United States.
We are told that democracy is one of the highest political values. Technocrats have been able to surround themselves with myths claiming that they only make scientific decisions, guided exclusively by Data. We are told that these technocrats don't get involved in politics and make the right decisions based on what science tells them.
The truth is that there is nothing non-political, scientific, or even impartial about a technocrat's attitude to governance. Technocrats, like everyone else, have their own ideologies, their agendas, and their own interests. Often their interests are at variance with those of the general public, which pays them their salaries and obeys their orders. The growth of technocracy means only that the means of influencing politics are now limited to a much smaller number of people, namely those who are already influential and enter the high offices. Technocracy seems less politically biased because it confines political debate to what used to be called "smoky rooms." That is, technocracy is a kind of oligarchy, although it is not limited to the financially rich. She is limited to peoplewho go to the “right” schools or control powerful corporations like Google or Facebook, or work for influential media organizations. This is considered “non-political” because ordinary voters and taxpayers cannot know exactly who is involved in the political process and what policies are being discussed. In other words, technocracy is the rule of a small, exclusive club. And you are not in it.
So how does technocracy survive in a system that claims to base its legitimacy on democratic institutions? After all, technocracy is anti-democratic in nature. Indeed, because the left has a dislike for democracy, it is demanding technocratic methods to do away with democratic institutions. In a widely cited 2011 article for the New Republic, influential banker and economist Peter Orsag complains that democratic institutions such as Congress do not implement enough of their preferred policies. Therefore, he insists that it is time to "abandon the Civics 101 fairy tale of pure representative democracy and instead start building a new set of rules and institutions." He wants to rule like a technocrat through a system of "commissions" staffed by "independent experts."
This is a new model of “effective” government. But the United States is already governed that way in many areas. There is no shortage of councils, commissions, courts and agencies that are supervised by experts who function largely without any oversight from voters, taxpayers or elected officials.
We can point to several institutions in which technocrats are very influential.
First: US Supreme Court
The trend towards technocracy first appeared in the US Supreme Court. The court has long been considered a kind of legal expert. They had to deal with technical legal issues, separate from the vicissitudes of electoral politics. But such expertise is limited. It implies that the court will limit its own power otherwise there is a risk of interference in the work of democracy. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, these restrictions were largely removed. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court created many new “rights” that Congress has never shown any willingness to create. For example, Roe v. Wade created a new federal legal right to abortion based solely on the wishes of a handful of judges, and while virtually everyone assumed thatthat abortion is a matter for the state legislature.
Prior to this period, any change of this magnitude would require a constitutional amendment. That is, before the emergence of a modern Supreme Court with superpowers, it was assumed that serious changes to the Constitution would require long public debate and the participation of many voters and legislators. But with the rise of the Supreme Court as the expert creator of the new law, it has become the norm for judges to dispense with public debate and decision-making in elections. Instead, experts will “discover” what the Constitution really means and create their own new laws based on legal “expertise”.
Second: the Federal Reserve
The second building block of technocracy was the Federal Reserve. Since its inception in 1935, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Board has increasingly acted as a council of policy-making technocrats who function outside the legislative process, but at the same time pass regulations that have an enormous impact on banking systems, financial sector and even fiscal policy.
Fed politicians are the most typical technocrats in the sense that they ostensibly make decisions based only on “data” and not taking political considerations into account. The sacred nature of the decisions of these technocrats is reinforced by years of repeating the mantra of the Fed's “independence” from political pressure from the White House or Congress.
In reality, of course, the Fed has never been an apolitical institution, and this has been demonstrated by various scholars, many of whom were political scientists. The Fed's advice has always been influenced by presidents and other politicians. (Most economists are too deliberately naive to understand the political aspects of the Fed.) It has now become abundantly clear that the Fed exists to support the political regime and the financial sector by any means necessary. The idea that this process is based on an impartial examination of “data” is laughable.
Third: medical experts
A new addition to America's growing ranks of technocrats is a legion of medical experts - at all levels of government - who have tried to dictate policy during the 2020 COVID-19 panic. Public health experts, led by life-long government officials such as Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, are typical technocrats: they are guided only by “science,” and it is argued that only these experts have the power to dictate and implement government policy that will determine risks associated with various diseases.
As with the Federal Reserve and the Supreme Court, those who oppose medical experts sacrifice their apolitical objectivity - a virtue that only technocrats (and their supporters) have - for political gain.
Fourth: intelligence agencies
Since 1945, the United States government has built an ever-expanding intelligence agency network of more than a dozen agencies staffed by professional military personnel. As we have seen in recent years, despite many scandals at the CIA, NSA and FBI, these technocrats have not stopped trying to undermine the elected civilian government in order to validate their own agenda. These bureaucrats in the so-called deep state in many cases consider themselves not accountable to the elected government and even try to reject the foreign policy decisions it has made.
Why elected politicians empower technocrats
In all of these cases, elected officials can intervene to limit the power of the technocrats, but they choose not to.
In the case of the Supreme Court, Congress can limit the jurisdiction of the courts of appeal - and thus the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court itself - simply by amending legislation. Likewise, Congress could abolish or severely restrict the powers of the Federal Reserve. But Congress decides not to. And, of course, Congress and state legislatures can easily intervene to overturn not only the powers of medical technocrats, but also the emergency powers of the executive branch itself. Until that happened.
The reason is that politicians like to “outsource” policy making to unelected technocrats. This allows elected officials to later argue that they are not responsible for unpopular measures taken by technocratic institutions. By placing more power in the hands of technocrats, elected politicians may later say that they respected the "apolitical" nature of these institutions and that they sought to respect "experience." “Don't blame me,” such a politician would later declare, “I was only trying to respect 'science', 'data' or 'the law.'
Empowering technocracy is a good way to remove the blame from politicians, and also, as Orszag suggests, bypass legislative institutions that do what they should: prevent the government from acting if it lacks votes.
With a technocracy, running out of votes in Congress isn't a problem: just hand it over to a dozen technocrats who will decide what to do. In this case, decisions will be made out of the public eye and will have an additional advantage, since this decision is not politically committed "experts".
Unfortunately, this scheme worked. Voters tend to trust “experts” - polls often show that the public trusts unelected “experts” more than Congress. This is a great victory for the bureaucrats and those who strive for an ever stronger state.
Ryan McMacken Mises Institute.
Translation by Natalia Afonchina, editor Vladimir Zolotorev