Obama weaponized every part of the federal government for political and ideological purposes. We're still paying the price, with debacles like the Centers for Disease Control being unprepared to actually control a disease and seeming surprised that anyone would ask it to.
Obama's reign was the Ineptocracy, a time when top bureaucrats constantly failed upward because they were terrible at their actual jobs and unable to complete core missions, but they were good at parroting Obama's ideology or furthering his partisan political interests.
A tsunami of money slammed into every federal agency under Obama. The bloat made them demonstrably WORSE at their core missions. They lost focus and became obsessed with mission creep so they could gobble up even more funding.
Above all else, the people running those agencies under Obama competed to bend whatever the nominal functions of their departments were to pursue partisan Democrat ends and push Obama's ideology. If a problem wasn't useful to furthering that ideology, it was ignored.
Run the list of Obama scandals: the IRS targeting conservative groups. the massive "green energy" debacles, the FBI effort to subvert the incoming Trump administration, on and on. The heart of each was an agency abandoning its core mission and guidelines for political ends.
Obama and his team worked hard to corrupt every agency by exploring how much latitude their hand-picked officials had to infuse political considerations into every aspect of agency business. They mapped the outer limits of official discretion: what to pursue, what to ignore.
It's hardly the first time government agencies have been abused, of course, but it was never done on the scale Obama engineered, never with such a unified agenda of partisan advantage and social engineering. Big Government became a laboratory and the American people its lab rats.
That intense degree of politicization naturally created a high level of institutional blindness and stupidity. From the top down, agencies became incapable of seeing anything that distracted them from pursuing the Obama agenda. They only saw the problems they WANTED to "fix."
We see this again and again, all the way to the present day, with billion-dollar agencies with tens of thousands of employees who churned out trillions of pages of documentation "proving" they were ready to handle any crisis... but they keep bungling their core responsibilities.
This, again, is hardly new to Big Government, or even huge private companies, but it got so much worse under Obama. Politicized agencies are absolutely OBSESSED with paperwork. It's how they cover their misdeeds and create that vital space for politically charged discretion.
Every agency that fell spectacularly on its face during the Obama years - the IRS, the GAO, DOE, Veterans Affairs - was swimming in an ocean of paperwork that "proved" its top officials were doing a GREAT job and deserved huge bonuses.
They were much busier creating that palace of paperwork than actually DOING their jobs, securing their agencies against abuse, or making real preparations for nightmare scenarios. The natural tendency toward careerism blended with ideological polarization and became toxic.
That's how we got another running scandal of the Obama years: incredible amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse. Every agency had paperwork that "proved" it was cracking down, but in truth they didn't care that much about thieves stealing their money, as long as it went out the door.
Obama realized that the very worst tendencies of Big Government were useful to him. All of its bugs became features. More than ever before, he taught millions of bureaucrats to see themselves as better than the people - not servants, but social doctors with a duty of care.
Corrupt media helped Obama every step of the way. So what if his agencies were all engaged in partisan political games, social engineering, and ideological insanity? They MEANT well. HE meant well. Intentions were all that mattered. Outcomes were irrelevant.
The story was always whatever Obama said the problem was, his boundless compassion measured by how much money he wanted to seize and spend, and the heartless evil of intransigent Republicans and Tea Party terrorists standing in his way.
Every political story under Obama was a fairy tale with the third act missing. No wonder the Ineptocracy was unable to deal with a REAL crisis like the coronavirus. Obama's government was wholly focused on engineering society, not serving its interests in a time of peril. /end
