Quote of the Day (Mike Lofgren, on a Longtime Excuse from Lobbyists)

“They keep moving the goal posts on us. Another hoary sports metaphor implying unfair treatment of the lobbyist’s client. In reality, what it means is that the government procurement organization has the temerity to demand that the client meet the required cost, schedule, and performance criteria in the contract.”— Historian, writer, and former congressional staff member Mike Lofgren, “The Washington Lobbyist’s Phrasebook,” Washington Monthly, July/August 2018 issue

As I read this quote, I chuckled at business executives’ lament about “moving the goal posts.” These days, after President Trump permitted Elon Musk to bulldoze multiple federal regulatory agencies, there are few if any goal posts, let alone yardsticks, for the business world to complain about.

That may turn out to be a mixed blessing not just for American society but for corporate libertarians.

For one thing, CEOs will no longer have an excuse for their underperformance. (Not that they won’t try to create new ones, anyway.)

Worse, though, is the blizzard of changes to the procurement process resulting from Trump’s aggressive use of executive orders—150 from his inauguration through early May, according to a “Government Contracts Update” issued that month by the international law firm Vinson & Elkins. Who can imagine what the longtime bible of the procurement process, the Federal Register (pictured), will look like a year from now?

Uncertainty is the new coin of the realm in a Washington dominated by a certain “stable genius.”

The “Update” focuses on four of those executive orders, laying out, in admirably cogent detail, their impacts. But even before that, it surely leaves many readers in a sweat by cautioning them to brace for “an increased risk of terminations, changes, delays, and disputes.”

How bad could this be? How about Executive Order 14275 (“Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement”), sharply reducing and narrowing compliance obligations—but also eliminating the uniformity and predictability derived from long experience with relevant agencies?

What George Wallace memorably derided as “pointy-headed bureaucrats” are going to look much more appealing than a new class of officials, all trying to guess at the intentions of a mercurial President.

Trump and Musk promoted their changes as a means of cutting a swath through the “deep state” of unelected bureaucrats who thwart Presidential will. That’s much to the chagrin of Lofgren, a conservative Republican who coined the term and even wrote a book on the subject, only to see it co-opted in ways he never intended.

By this June, Lofgren, having long since vowed not to vote for the GOP again until it would “demonstrate to me that they've purged Trumpism," was starkly warning, in an essay for Salon, that the term “authoritarian” was insufficient to describe how the administration is now “distinctly moving toward the principal goal of the totalitarian project: erasing the distinction between civil society and the state”—i.e., inserting itself into “every facet of American life,” including “dictating prices to retail businesses.”

The chances of what Michael Waldman, head of the Brennan Center for Justice, foresaw with the second coming of Trump in November—the rise of “crony capitalism” due to the widespread imposition of tariffs—can only double now with the new helter-skelter procurement regime in Washington.