The Burn Down

It is not a mistake. It is a strategy.

The playbook has three stages. Demonize. Defund. Destroy. The goal is not to make the government work better. The goal is to break the public trust so thoroughly that the public begs for the private solution. Or the police solution. The taxpayer funds the demolition. The contractor collects the revenue. The public pays for the service they used to own.

The burn down is a con. And it is happening everywhere you look.

The first stage is the narrative. The agency is corrupt. The agency is inefficient. The agency is dangerous. The narrative is not about facts. It is about perception. If you believe the system is broken, you will not fight for it. You will demand it be replaced.

Social Security is a scam. The IRS is the enemy. The Post Office is inefficient. Public schools are failing. The TSA is security theater. The narrative is repeated until it becomes common knowledge. The agency is mocked, memed, and maligned. The public is trained to hate the experience of interacting with the government. The anger is real. But the target is wrong.

The second stage is the starvation. The agency is stripped of the resources it needs to function. Staff is cut. Budgets are frozen. Maintenance is deferred. The backlog grows. The lines get longer. The phone waits stretch to hours. The website crashes. The failure is visible. It is frustrating. It is also manufactured.

The TSA is the perfect example. For years, the agency has been understaffed. The turnover rate is high. The pay is low. The job is stressful. The result is exactly what you would expect. Long lines at checkpoints. Missed flights. Frustrated travelers. Agents who are rude because they are overworked. The public hates the experience. They hate the agency. They do not realize the experience was designed to fail.

The third stage is the handover. The public, now convinced that the government cannot do the job, is offered the solution. Pre-Check. Charter schools. Vouchers. Private water contracts. The service is restored, but only for those who pay. The public function becomes a private product. The wealthy buy their way out of the failure they funded. The poor are trapped in it.

The TSA checkpoint is now a class divider. If you pay, you skip the line. If you do not pay, you wait. The security theater is still there. The government failure is still there. But for a fee, you can avoid it. The solution is not to fix the agency. The solution is to monetize the failure.

But the burn down has a darker turn. The destruction of the public capacity opens the door for something worse than a fee. It opens the door for the security state. The understaffing is now being used to justify replacing TSA agents with ICE agents. The airport becomes a checkpoint. The safety screen becomes a dragnet. The function of the agency is repurposed from serving the traveler to policing the population. The infrastructure remains. The purpose is hijacked. The burn down does not just sell the wreckage. It weaponizes it.

The two-tier system is the point. The goal is not just privatization. It is stratification. The wealthy do not experience the government they dismantled. They have private schools, private healthcare, private security, private screenings. They have bought their way out of the public sphere. The middle class is sold the fantasy that they can escape too, if they just work hard enough. The poor are left in the wreckage. And the undocumented are hunted in it.

The United States Postal Service is the blueprint. In 2006, Congress passed a law requiring the USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits. No other agency or company in America has this requirement. It was designed to bankrupt the Post Office. The mandate cost the USPS over $5 billion a year. The narrative became that the Post Office was failing. The reality was that it was sabotaged. The solution offered was to close post offices, end Saturday delivery, and sell off the real estate to private developers. The most popular government institution in the country was strangled by a law designed to kill it.

The narrative for privatization is always efficiency. The government is slow. The private sector is fast. The free market will solve what bureaucracy cannot. It is a lie. Private companies are not more efficient at providing service. They are more efficient at extracting profit. They cut corners. They hide their books. They are not accountable to the public. The line gets shorter for those who pay. It gets longer for everyone else. That is not efficiency. That is segregation. The efficiency is in the extraction, not the service.

Public education is the largest and most visible target. The narrative is failing schools. The solution is vouchers and charter schools. The defunding is real. Teacher pay is stagnant. Class sizes grow. Supplies are not provided. The schools are stripped of resources. Then the test scores drop. The drop is used as proof that public education is broken. The voucher is offered as the escape. The public money follows the child to the private school. The private school selects the students it wants. The public school is left with the students the private school rejected, and less money to teach them. The cycle feeds itself. The public school dies. The private profit grows.

The same playbook runs on water. Flint. Jackson. The narrative is that the government cannot maintain the pipes. The reality is austerity. The infrastructure is not maintained because the maintenance budget is cut. When the water becomes poison, the private solution appears. Bottled water companies profit. Private water contracts are signed. The most basic human need becomes a revenue stream. The public pays for water twice. Once in taxes for the pipes they do not fix. Once at the store for the bottles they have to buy.

Social Security is next. The narrative is that the system is going bankrupt. The solution is to cut benefits, raise the retirement age, or privatize the accounts. The reality is that the system is not bankrupt. It is underfunded. The cap on taxable income means the wealthy pay a smaller percentage than the poor. But the narrative is set. The agency is demonized as a ponzi scheme. The service is degraded. Offices are closed. Phone lines are understaffed. The public gets frustrated. The public demands a solution. The private solution is waiting.

The IRS is already there. Staffing cuts have made it impossible to process returns or answer questions. The taxpayer cannot reach a human being. The frustration builds. The narrative is that the agency is incompetent. The solution is to outsource tax collection to private companies. The companies take a cut of the revenue. The taxpayer pays the fee. The government collects less. The contractor gets rich.

The contractors are not just friends. They are often the same people. The secretary of education pushes vouchers and then joins the board of a charter chain. The TSA administrator leaves to consult for Clear. The EPA official who deregulates water standards takes a job with the private water company. The person who breaks the system is personally invested in the company that will fix it. They are demolishing a house they own the construction contract for. The revolving door spins so fast that the public cannot track who is on which side. There is no which side. There is only the profit.

Once the public function is dismantled, it doesn’t come back. The expertise is lost. The institutional memory is erased. The contracts are signed for decades. The reversal is nearly impossible. The burn down is not a temporary state. It is a permanent transfer of power from the public to the private. The agency is gone. The company remains. The service is now a product. The citizen is now a customer.

And the customer has no power. When a public agency fails, you can vote out the mayor. You can call your representative. You can organize. You can demand accountability. When a private contractor fails, you cannot vote out the CEO. You can file a complaint that goes nowhere. You can call a customer service line that is understaffed on purpose. The privatization of public services is the privatization of accountability. You lose the power to demand better. You are no longer a citizen with rights. You are a consumer with a receipt.

The public is trained to hate the government service. They experience the long lines, the broken website, the understaffed office, the undrinkable water. They demand a solution. They think they are choosing efficiency. They do not realize they are being conned into paying for what they already owned. The anger is directed at the government. It should be directed at the people who broke the government.

The contracts are awarded without competitive bidding. The lobbyist writes the legislation that creates the contract. The politician signs the bill. The donor gets the work. The taxpayer funds the deal. The profit is private. The debt is public. The agency is stripped. The company is built.

The cycle is complete. The public is angry. The government is weakened. The contractors are rich. The service is a memory. The accountability is gone.

The burn down is not a mistake. It is a plan; And it is working.

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