Federal bureaucracies funded by taxpayers are effectively unaccountable and nearly impossible to shut down no matter how badly they perform, argues Lloyd Billingsley in a new essay for American Thinker. Billingsley, a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, builds his case by walking through a quarter-century of intelligence and public-health failures — 9/11, Benghazi, the COVID-19 response, and a California unemployment fraud scandal — and noting that in each episode, the people in charge kept their jobs or retired on their own terms.
The through-line he identifies isn’t incompetence alone. It’s a structural arrangement in which officials serve in powerful roles without ever facing Senate confirmation, and in which failure carries no visible cost. “Funded by taxpayers, federal bureaucracies are unaccountable and impossible to shut down, regardless of performance,” Billingsley writes.
Starting with 9/11 — and what wasn’t remembered
Billingsley opens on the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. The nation, he notes, honored the dead and the first responders. What dropped out of the collective memory, in his telling, was the Central Intelligence Agency’s failure to stop the worst attack on American soil since 1941.
He draws on former CIA director John Brennan’s memoir, Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad, which recalls the morning of September 11, 2001, when word arrived that the Pentagon had been hit and a plane had gone down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Brennan was then chief of staff to CIA director George Tenet, who ordered the agency’s building evacuated.
The essay then jumps ahead eleven years, to September 11, 2012, when al Qaeda terrorists marked the anniversary by attacking U.S. facilities in Benghazi, killing Ambassador Christopher Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. Billingsley cites Mike Morell’s book, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism — From al Qa’ida to ISIS, in which the agency initially framed the assault as part of a demonstration against an obscure American-made film that many Muslims believed insulted the Prophet Muhammad. Morell, who served as the CIA’s permanent deputy director and twice as acting director without Senate confirmation, has acknowledged excising material “to protect the Central Intelligence Agency” — which, Billingsley observes dryly, is not the same thing as protecting the public.
The COVID briefings nobody watched
From there Billingsley moves to early 2020 and the earliest federal voice on COVID-19: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, who delivered a series of telebriefings largely outside public view. According to the essay, those briefings laid out everything Dr. Anthony Fauci would later say publicly — that a “novel coronavirus” had emerged from a market in Wuhan, that there was no prior immunity, and that the virus would spread nationwide, requiring businesses and schools to close.
What the government never disclosed, Billingsley writes, is that Messonnier’s briefings were scripted by a communications team that included Dr. Anne Schuchat, who twice served as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention without Senate confirmation. Both Schuchat and Messonnier were veterans of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, the corps of so-called disease detectives whose mission is to keep viruses from reaching American shores — a mission that, on Billingsley’s reading, plainly failed with COVID. The CDC, he adds, never explained that failure to the American people, and both doctors retired abruptly in May 2021.
The acting secretary who stayed put
The next stop is 2023 and Julie Su, Joe Biden’s pick for labor secretary. Billingsley writes that Su, as a California labor official, looked past more than $30 billion in unemployment fraud, with convicts and fraudsters collecting checks while legitimate workers in need went without. He also flags her support for California Assembly Bill 5, which he characterizes as a declaration against worker independence — affecting everyone from truck drivers to freelance writers, editors, and musicians.
The Senate never confirmed Su, Billingsley notes, yet a Government Accountability Office ruling allowed her to remain in the role as acting secretary. For the essay’s purposes, that outcome is the whole point: prolonged incompetence, canceled accountability, and a bureaucratic dynamic now firmly in place.
Fauci, Tenet, and the absence of consequences
Billingsley makes clear he isn’t arguing that Senate confirmation guarantees competence. His exhibit is George Tenet, confirmed by the Senate as CIA director in July 1997, whose agency had no inkling of the 9/11 plot — and who nonetheless remained director until 2004. He notes there has been no public word of any CIA bosses disciplined, demoted, or dismissed over 9/11, while Brennan recorded that the agency’s secret budget was significantly increased. The failure also spawned a new bureaucracy, the Department of Homeland Security.
Fauci, a government bureaucrat since 1968 and head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, was never confirmed by the Senate, Billingsley points out. Biden pardoned Fauci — but not Schuchat or Messonnier — and Congress has so far not subpoenaed the two women to testify about the CDC and EIS failures.
He also ticks off a list of attacks the DHS, CIA, and FBI failed to prevent: Fort Hood in 2009, the Boston Marathon in 2013, San Bernardino in 2015, and Orlando in 2016, each with heavy loss of innocent life. His ballpark estimate of the bureaucrats who lost their jobs over them: zero.
Billingsley closes by tying terrorism, what he calls “white-coat supremacy,” and the question of worker independence together under a single theme — memory against forgetting. It’s a pointed ending, and a reminder that the essay is an argument rather than a neutral accounting: many of the failures he catalogues were the subject of years of investigations, and the question of who deserved blame remains contested. What Billingsley wants readers to take away is narrower and harder to dispute — that no one in the chain ever seemed to pay.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/deep-state-dynamics/