Wildlife officers tracking a nuisance crocodile usually have a GPS ping and not much else. The coordinates say where the animal is. They say nothing about how it is behaving — whether it is drifting past a boat launch or stalking it. In a new commentary for American Thinker, David DeMay uses that gap as the frame for an argument about government itself: institutions, he writes, are managed by presence, and presence is just a GPS ping.
DeMay’s piece, published October 9, 2026 under the heading “Government as wildlife management,” is not a proposal for deregulation in the ordinary sense. It is an argument about what we choose to measure. Traditional wildlife management, he notes, tends to be reactive. When a crocodile becomes a threat, officers may have a location but no read on behavior. By the time a coordinate triggers an emergency response, the harm may already be done.
There is more to learn from behavior than from location, he contends. Approach speed, body posture, repeated threatening movements, sudden acceleration — these are the signals a set of coordinates cannot carry. A single point on a map can’t tell an officer whether an animal is passing through or preparing to strike.
Behavioral tracking as a warning system
This is where DeMay sees advanced telemetry and artificial intelligence changing the calculus. Pair GPS tracking with sensors that measure acceleration, turning, and repeated movements, and an AI system could flag behavioral patterns associated with escalating risk. The point is not a better record of where an animal has been, but an early read on what it may do next. Location says where; behavioral trajectory suggests what may happen, he writes.
He extends the logic to relocation as well. Moving a nuisance crocodile should not mean moving the uncertainty elsewhere. An animal equipped with appropriate sensors could remain under electronic monitoring, allowing AI to detect how its behavior shifts as it meets a new environment. Early warning of escalating risk, on this view, could justify intervention before another dangerous encounter occurs — rather than waiting for the encounter to supply the evidence.
Then DeMay turns the lens around. The governing parallel, he insists, is the pattern, not the apparatus. Institutions are managed by presence: budgets, headcount, physical footprint, treaty membership. Presence is the GPS ping. It confirms that an agency or a commitment still exists. It says nothing about whether that institution is fulfilling its purpose or has become a greater burden than the problem it was built to address.
The institutional equivalents of an attack posture, he argues, are ordinary and easy to miss. A failure is followed by a larger budget. A program is renewed after its stated aim has failed. A commitment is kept after the means to honor it have gone. An office is created to supervise a problem it then perpetuates. Each remedy adds a permanent obligation and leaves the prior one in place. That compounding, DeMay writes, is the trajectory — the slow build that a snapshot of presence will never reveal.
The remedy: retire, don’t supervise
What follows from the diagnosis matters as much as the diagnosis itself. Where those characteristics appear, DeMay argues, the remedy does not require another monitoring bureaucracy. It requires retiring the obligation that is compounding — closing the program, the office, or the commitment before another one is opened. Creating an elaborate new system to supervise institutional failure, he warns, risks adding yet another permanent layer to the very problem under examination.
It is a familiar conservative argument about institutional self-perpetuation, but DeMay’s framing is unusual. He is not claiming governments should literally be run like wildlife officers run a crocodile response. The lesson, he writes, is narrower and more general at once: danger often announces itself through changing behavior long before catastrophe occurs. In a swamp, that warning may justify intervention before an attack. In government, it may justify retiring a failing obligation before another remedy is piled on top of it.
The failure, in his telling, is not simply that we cannot see the danger coming. It is that we keep measuring its location while ignoring its direction. Agencies, he concludes, can be like rogue crocodiles — and managed in the same way.
The piece sits in a long tradition of commentary on the difficulty of shutting down government programs once they exist. DeMay’s contribution is the analogy itself: a case for treating behavioral trajectory, not institutional presence, as the metric that matters. Whether that standard could be applied with any precision to agencies, treaties, or offices is a question the commentary raises without attempting to answer — the argument is about which signals deserve attention, and it leaves the measurement problem where it finds it.
What the essay does not contain is a list of specific programs or agencies it wants retired, nor any proposed mechanism for deciding when a commitment’s behavior has crossed from passing through into threatening. Its claim is more structural: that the reflex to build a supervisory layer on top of a failing institution is itself a form of the compounding it purports to fix. Read one way, that is a call for restraint. Read another, it is an admission that the warning signs are legible only in hindsight — which is, of course, the trouble with crocodiles too.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/government-as-wildlife-management/