As the CEO of a public policy group in the Free State of Florida, one that has worked on health policy for nearly 30 years, I have never met Dr. Anthony Fauci. Yet as someone who has spent much of my career engaged in this arena, I read over, with interest, the inner thoughts he chose to type into his taxpayer-owned computer, particularly his feelings for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), coupled with the 111 times he chose to invoke his Fifth Amendment privileges before a Senate committee hearing. I had a re-epiphany of sorts. While I want to direct 100% of my ire at the man who arbitrarily altered people’s lives, ended careers, delayed critical health treatments, and dared anyone to question him, we should also place much of our righteous indignation toward the system and culture he personifies — a swamp bureaucracy unaccountable to voters that yet holds unimaginable influence over our daily lives.
Our organization, The James Madison Institute, is named for the man credited with authoring much of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The protections guaranteed by those documents, including the right against self-incrimination, are sacrosanct. I would never argue — publicly or privately — for diluting those. Fauci is free to invoke that right. My speculation, based purely on what we have all seen thus far, is that his decision was personally wise.
However, as the taxpayer-paid head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the highest-paid employee in the entire federal government, Fauci’s words (and thoughts) matter greatly. And those thoughts, which he chose to place in a diary contained on a government computer, reveal as much about the culture of the Washington bureaucracy as they do a man who seemed to care more about his celebrity stature than his mission to protect Americans. Consider a May 2020 diary entry, in which he speaks of the highlight of his day — Julia Roberts calling him “her hero.” It’s reassuring to know that in one of the earliest and very worst months of pandemic hysteria, the head of the NIAID was sufficiently ego-stroked by an Oscar winner.
His attitude toward anyone who dared deviate from his (completely wrong and misguided) strategies dealing with COVID-19 reveals an individual obsessed with becoming, to use his own words, “the most famous person in the United States and one of the most recognizable in the world.” That attitude was placed on full display with his comments toward DeSantis, Florida’s elected governor and someone who actually paid attention to data before making informed decisions for the state’s 23 million citizens. Don’t listen to me, listen to the man himself, shortly after calling DeSantis a “disgrace” and “total jerk” in August 2021:
“This is an obviously calculated plan of disparaging me and any other scientists (but focusing heavily on me) that speak up against their crazy strategy.”
Read that date once more — August 2021. Fauci was more concerned with his ego and status than with America’s public health a year after Florida chose to open back up. While Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) gave interviews with her Fauci pillow in the background, proudly amplifying her draconian vaccine mandates, DeSantis was studying public health data and doing his job, discerning the best policy approach for the people who elected him to serve. And he was correct. Had he not been, the voters of Florida would have had the opportunity to remove him the American way, on Election Day — a right not afforded to us when it comes to the same federal bureaucracy Fauci led at the time.
Watching him refuse to answer questions of elected senators, citing his Fifth Amendment right, made me, as I am sure many of you, furious. But Fauci is (pardon the pun) the symptom, not the disease. The disease is an unelected, arrogant swamp bureaucracy. The correlation stares us in the face every day. Despite the Trump administration’s best DOGE efforts, the continued struggle is that the bureaucracy exists to protect its own, not the taxpayers it purports to serve. When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. When you’re a government bureau, everything that is a threat to bureaucratic expansion must be destroyed.
FAUCI’S FALL: ‘THE SCIENCE’ PLEADS THE FIFTH
Quite possibly the saddest truth is that Fauci isn’t special. He’s not evil incarnate or the devil in the flesh. Stop me if you’ve heard that from Washington before. He’s just the most recognizable personage of the real enemy every American should be fighting against. That enemy is the undisputed belief and blind trust in the federal government, a lack of any self-awareness as to the breadth of damage done, and the most frightening — a “move on, nothing to see here” attitude that seeks only to wait out people’s attention spans as the next news cycle appears. That would be the real tragedy here, that like so many other scandals, there is no real systemic change, only a shifting shell game sending us further down the road of tyranny.
Fauci will go away. The bureaucracy he so championed will remain. Whether we allow it to consume us again is a choice we will make. I hope people look at Washington and Florida and choose wisely.
Dr. Robert McClure is president and CEO of The James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida.