Op-Ed: Government Opacity

The following Op-Ed was submitted by Brent Regan. Op-Eds do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of those at the Idaho Dispatch.

Much of what our government does is designed to hide the truth. The bureaucrats, lobbyists and lawyers that actually run the government act as if they don’t want you to see or know how they are performing, by design. I say “design” because if the true goal was transparency then we would see the system evolve towards that goal. But we don’t see that. What we do see is repeated behaviors that are specifically engineered to hide the truth.

The latest Continuing Resolution (CR) bill to fund the government for the next few days is just the latest in a long pattern of such devices. When Congress passed the last CR they knew EXACLY when the next authorization would be needed. It would not come as surprise. The people whose job it is to know such things were well informed and aware of the task at hand. Did they prepare a clean bill that simply continued existing spending for a short period of time? No! They engineered a 1,500 page document that was submitted just hours before it was to be voted on the Friday before Christmas.

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The clear intent was to ramrod the bill through before anyone had a chance to read and analyze the contents. This was no accident because it is how it’s been done time after time. It is designed to be opaque. It is designed to grab as much funding out of the public coffers as possible with no real transparency. We can’t pretend this is an accident or incompetence. It is Congress’s job to manage expenditures, to hold the purse strings, and yet they fail miserably.

Even the idea of a “Continuing Resolution” is a joke. If they couldn’t do the job over the last year what makes anyone seriously believe a few more weeks will set things right? It’s done this way because congressional leadership WANTS to do it this way. Hold off till the last minute and then rush to pass a pork packed bill through at the eleventh hour before any real scrutiny can be applied. Of course the feckless and feculent “main stream media,” whose job it is to report on corruption remained silent while waiting for their scraps to fall from the glutton’s table.

Just how insidious are the Democrats? In March or 2024 the Republican controlled House of Representatives passed a pediatric cancer research bill, the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act ($12.6M), but the bill was held in the Democrat controlled Senate knowing it would be useful later. It was added to the CR so when the Republicans did not vote to pass it the headline would be “GOP cuts kids cancer research.” Democrat leadership would literally rather have kids die of cancer if it means getting their pork spending passed. Despicable, and the media goes along.

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The CR should have passed before we could see what was in it. The dirty tricks worked in the past and they should have worked again, but they didn’t. Why? What changed?

Democracy changed. Not the kind of democracy the Democrats chant about. Not the democracy where you import millions of foreign nationals, give them cash, housing, benefits and the vote so they can reelect their Patrons. Not the kind of democracy where millions of mailed ballots magically appear in exactly the right places and in exactly the right quantity to tip an election in their favor.

Not those types of democracy, the real democracy where the people become informed and express their desires directly to their elected representatives. The kind of democracy that puts the people ahead of the bureaucrats, lobbyists and lawyers. The kind of democracy feared on K Street.

Government is designed to hide corruption. The IRS will come after you for a $601 unreported transaction but the Pentagon can fail its audit seven years in a row being unable to account for tens of billions of dollars and NOTHING happens. All the penalties are directed towards the voter so that you believe there is accountability, and there is, but only for you and not the bureaucrats.

The failed CR Bill had a provision to block Congress’s digital communications from being subpoenaed. Why would you need such a provision other than to hid corruption and illegal activity?

What about the most basic question?  Who is running the country? Under the Biden administration we do not know. Now that Biden’s usefulness has waned we are learning that from day one he was mentally unable to perform the duties of President, and that White House staff shielded him from the Cabinet, the media and the public. Who is running the country? To this day we don’t know.

If government is to hide corruption then the media must not do its job. The media must turn away from the malfeasance so that the people are uninformed and democracy is kept in the dark. Any alternate sources of information must be quashed or censored and we saw exactly that in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Then Elon Musk bought Twitter which triggered the release of the Twitter Files which exposed the web of censorship and manipulation of the news. It exposed the inner working of the propaganda engine and the hypnotic spell was broken.

The 1,500 page Continuing Resolution failed because of democracy. Through X, millions of people became aware of the scam minutes after it was presented. Switchboards and emails lit up with citizens expressing their distain and representatives reacted accordingly. The CR was dead and democracy killed it.

It’s just common sense.