Faucism’s New Deal Origins

aier.org/article/faucisms-new-deal-origins/

March 9, 2023

Robert E. Wright

– March 9, 2023 Reading Time: 4 minutes

The latest batch of Fauci files was supposed to have been released on Twitter in
January, but has gone AWOL, if not down the Memory Hole. Could it be because they
too clearly reveal the face of Faucism, a type of administrative dictatorship exemplified
by Anthony Fauci’s almost four-decade reign over the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID)?

Faucism combines control over financial resources and information with a carefully
cultivated cult of personality. Fauci’s power grab went unnoticed for so long because the
stakes seemed low, just $400,000+ a year in salary and the power to direct about $6
billion a year in research funding.

We’ve since learned that Fauci and his wife, who coincidentally was the chief bioethicist
at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), earned almost $1.8 million in 2020 from their
salaries, investment gains, and patent royalties. Their combined net worth was north of

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$10 million then, and is likely much higher now. The interest from that nest egg, plus a
$350,000 pension and ongoing royalty payments, will ensure Fauci a million-dollar-a-
year retirement income.

The personality cult Fauci built, with the help of progressive legacy media and social
media censorship, was so strong that his admirers’ public adulation of him waxed even
after public exposure of his multiple lies, logical inconsistencies, and megalomaniacal
claims to “represent science.”

Most impressive of all, though, was the policy power Fauci was able to wield through his
control of NIAID funding. Only a few brave, retired, or privately funded scientists dared to
question even his most strident pronouncements regarding COVID-19, because public
criticism of Fauci would likely have meant getting their funding cut, which is career
suicide for most research scientists. So Americans long remained in the dark about
crucial COVID facts, like infection-fatality rates, the efficacy of various therapies, and
mask and vaccine safety and effectiveness.

The only other major source of pushback came from those with sufficient intellectual
chops to understand what was occurring, but who were not beholden to Faucian
financing. Fauci knew that the lockdown and masking policies he pushed were
indefensible, so he reached out to other parts of the government to throttle the message
of those questioning lockdowns, including the authors of the Great Barrington
Declaration, and economists and policy analysts such as Phil Magness, associated with
AIER, the Independent Institute, and a few other nonprofits. The Fauci Files promised to
reveal the extent of his throttling campaign.

Now that Fauci has finally retired, it is tempting to think that America’s harrowing brush
with Faucism is over. Unfortunately, the administrative overreach at the heart of Faucism
has long been endemic in America’s national government. The disease struck hard
during the New Deal, the radical response of the administration of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt to the Great Depression. The First Hundred Days, the launch of the New
Deal, began 90 years ago this week.

AIER formed that same year, 1933, to combat the New Deal, which instituted a broad
series of costly, nation-changing reforms in the name of economic security. The Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), NIH, and NIAID were largely postwar
creations, but they were all modeled after New Deal era bureaucracies like the
Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and
the National Recovery Administration.

In each case, Congress delegated broad powers to the executive branch to achieve
some general goal(s). The executive branch then established an agency, commission,
corporation, or department, and empowered it to meet its general goal(s) through the
imposition of rules that soon came to have the force of law.

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Courts at first tried to adjudicate disputes arising under administrative rules and
managed to strike some of them down. But James M. Landis (1899-1964), a New
Dealer, erstwhile bureaucrat, and dean of Harvard’s law school, argued that it was
perfectly fine for unelected administrators to make crucial decisions about Americans’
lives, liberty, and property, based on rules that administrators created and adjudicated
themselves.

Any problems arising from giving administrators so much discretion could be solved,
Landis wrote in his 1938 book The Administrative Process, simply by improving
administrative procedures. Such a vast delegation of power was perfectly democratic,
because Congress and the President had agreed upon the law creating the bureaucracy
and also agreed on its continued funding.

Lawmakers, apologists from the administrative state suggested, would surely shut down
a rogue agency that, say, routinely bent laws against animal cruelty or flouted concerns
over gain-of-function research. Except Fauci and other bureaucrats, like those at the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), realized somewhere along the line that the US
government has grown too vast to be adequately monitored by Congress, or by 330
million people with their own pressing problems. The administrators can aggrandize or
enrich themselves pretty much as they see fit, especially during a putative “emergency.”

Although federal agencies and their leaders may occasionally get a slap on the wrist,
real checks against the arbitrary abuse of their power appear lacking. Many Americans
want to “drain the swamp,” and need to find a way to do so before the swamp drains
them of the remnants of their individual autonomy and bank accounts.

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Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at

the American Institute for Economic Research.
He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two
dozen major books, book series, and edited
collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas
Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019). He
has also (co)authored numerous articles for
important journals, including the American
Economic Review, Business History
Review, Independent Review, Journal of Private
Enterprise, Review of Finance, and Southern
Economic Review. Robert has taught business,
economics, and policy courses at Augustana
University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia,
and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.

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Selected Publications
Reducing Recidivism and Encouraging Desistance: A Social Entrepreneurial
Approach of Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy (Summer 2022).
“The Political Economy of Modern Wildlife Management: How Commercialization
Could Reduce Game Overabundance.” Independent Review (Spring 2022).
“Sowing the Seeds of a Future Crisis: The SEC and the Emergence of the
Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) Category, 1971-
75.” Co-authored with Andrew Smith. Business History Review (Winter 2021).
“AI ≠ UBI Income Portfolio Adjustment to Technological Transformation.” Co-
authored with Aleksandra Przegalinska. Frontiers in Human Dynamics: Social
Networks (2021).
“Liberty Befits All: Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Independent Review (Winter
2020).
“Pioneer Financial News National Broadcast Journalist Wilma Soss, NBC Radio,
1954-1980.” Journalism History (Fall 2018).
“Devolution of the Republican Model of Anglo-American Corporate Governance.”
Advances in Financial Economics (2015).
“The Pivotal Role of Private Enterprise in America’s Transportation Age, 1790-
1860.” Journal of Private Enterprise (Spring 2014)
“Corporate Insurers in Antebellum America.” Co-authored with Christopher
Kingston. Business History Review (Autumn 2012).
“The Deadliest of Games: The Institution of Dueling.” Co-authored with Christopher
Kingston. Southern Economic Journal (April 2010).
“Alexander Hamilton, Central Banker: Crisis Management During the U.S.
Financial Panic of 1792.” Co-authored with Richard E. Sylla and David J. Cowen.
Business History Review (Spring 2009).
“Integration of Trans-Atlantic Capital Markets, 1790-1845.” Co-authored with
Richard Sylla and Jack Wilson. Review of Finance (December 2006), 613-44.
“State ‘Currencies’ and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Clarifying Some
Confusions.” Co-authored with Ron Michener. American Economic Review (June
2005).
“Reforming the U.S. IPO Market: Lessons from History and Theory,” Accounting,
Business, and Financial History (November 2002).
“Bank Ownership and Lending Patterns in New York and Pennsylvania, 1781-
1831.” Business History Review (Spring 1999).

Find Robert

1. SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=362640
2. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3792-3506
3. Academia: https://robertwright.academia.edu/
4. Google: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=D9Qsx6QAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
5. Twitter, Gettr, and Parler: @robertewright

Books by Robert E. Wright

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