“Draining the swamp” has become the slogan du jour for just about anybody who wants to fix what’s been happening in our nation’s capital. It’s a catchy metaphor, but taken literally such a swamp-draining would not only be prohibitively costly to the taxpayer but would eliminate virtually every bureaucrat in the federal government. If we were a nation the size of New Hampshire, that might be OK. Maybe a better slogan would be “Strain the swamp.”
A brief sampling of unelected officials and their staffs who populate the massive granite edifices in D.C., as well as in many branch offices located throughout the 50 states, is enough to make anybody gasp. Here are just a few agency missions and headcount statistics:

1. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)—“foster open, transparent, competitive, and financially sound markets.” Headcount: 437.

2. Offices & Bureaus—comprises 18 separate functional groups such as Administrative Law Judges, General Counsel, Inspector General, Workplace Diversity, Public Safety & Homeland Security. Headcount: 1,720.

3. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)—comprises 12 different offices that “assist consumers in obtaining reliable, efficient and sustainable energy services at a reasonable cost through appropriate regulatory and market means.” Headcount:1,500.

4. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)— “to protect consumers by preventing anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices, enhancing informed consumer choice and public understanding of the competitive process, and accomplishing this without unduly burdening legitimate business activity.” Headcount: 1,165.

5. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) —With its headquarters in D.C. and 26 regional offices throughout the country, the NLRB “is an independent federal agency that protects the rights of private sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions.’ Headcount: 1,956.

6. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—“to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” Headcount: 5,196.

7. Internal Revenue Service (IRS)— “Provide America’s taxpayers top-quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and enforce the law with integrity and fairness to all.” Headcount (as of 2015): 82,203.

There are many more federal agencies to be accounted for, but this nearly 12,000 person sampling adds up to billions of taxpayer dollars spent on salaries alone every year. No wonder in 2018, we will have a federal budget deficit of $440 billion. No wonder, too, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has trouble making accurate projections every year. Does the average American voter know any of this? Probably not, because the “mainstream media” never reports about it.
Yet, ever since he took office on Jan. 20, President Trump has been faulted for not “draining the swamp.” If all you watch is cable news networks like CNN, CNBC and Fox, you’ll never hear anything said about the sheer vastness of the swamp. Instead you’ll hear the talking heads snarling about Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip “tweets,” and, of course, the “fake news” in The New York Times and The Washington Post about the Trump administration’s alleged collusion with the Russians.
The fact is Trump has been diligently doing the best he can to target and torpedo some of the biggest critters that prowl the depths of “the swamp.” Consider a few recent instances.

1. Congress passed and Trump signed into law 13 bills nullifying federal regulations enacted during the Obama administration. These included H.J. Res. 69 reversing a U.S. Fish and Wildlife rule affecting Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuges and S.J. Res. 34 reversing FCC Internet privacy rules.

2. Appointed constitutionalist Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch who, after weeks of Democratic committee caterwauling, was confirmed on April 7.

3. Fulfilled his campaign promise to kill the Trans-Pacifc Partnership (TPP) international trade agreement on Jan. 23.
4. Cut illegal border crossings from Mexico by 40 percent in February—a decreasing trend that rose to 70 percent within the next three months.

5. Reversed Obama’s timid response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons against civilians by ordering U.S. missile strikes on Syrian air bases.

6. Revived the Dakota Access Pipeline that had been blocked by Obama and reversed Obama’s ”land grab” executive orders, thus freeing the U.S. to use its own natural resources.

7. Reduced unemployment to a new low of 4.4 percent and increased U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to a new high of 2.6 percent.

Source: Snopes.com

Again, almost none of this real news about Trump has been reported in the “mainstream media.” Instead, the “talking heads” prefer to call out “crony capitalism” as one of the biggest causes of wasteful government spending. President Obama himself used the expression to criticize our capitalist economic system. In fact, as Sen. Rubio pointed out more than a year ago, “Obamacare is also bringing out corporate America’s worst crony-capitalist impulses.”
Remember the many times Obama proclaimed, “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor too. The only change you’ll see are falling costs as our reforms take place.” The only problem was Obama had to make some shady deals with the big health-care insurance companies to keep them hooked into Obamacare.
Here, according to Rubio, is how it worked: “The health-insurance lobby has teamed up with trial lawyers to sue the federal government—through individual lawsuits and a $5 billion class action—for not following through on a sweetheart bailout deal buried in the law. This provision of Obamacare would have required taxpayers to bail out insurers for losing money on the health-care exchanges.”
This “crony capitalist” deal is what continues to drive the Democrat and RINO stonewalling in Congress. It’s all part of the murky scum that covers the proverbial swamp, and Americans will probably wait until the midterm elections before anything will change for better or worse.
Sadly, the worse looked inevitable during the last week of July when Trump’s Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, resigned and Trump’s brash new Communications Director, Anthony Scaramucci, embarrassed everybody with stupid trash-talk. But sometimes calamities like this concentrate a leader’s mind—even that of an impulsive president like Donald J. Trump. In choosing Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly to replace Priebus, the president may at last have found his good angel. Perhaps this choice was in fact a case of divine intervention. Certainly, with Kim Jong Un’s latest test-launch of an ICBM capable of nuking Chicago, we’re all going to need some miracles.

Bruce Robinson is a writer and former Benicia resident.