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Washington’s Brain Trust Mirage

by James Bovard, September 2025

Washington politicians and bureaucrats are controlling much of your daily life. The more paternalistic government becomes, the more the state is a symbol of the superiority of some people over everyone else. How much wiser must some people be to entitle them to dictate how everyone else lives?

The President Is a Lot Smarter Than You Think was the book title of a 1973 collection of Doonesbury cartoons. The book cover showed a construction worker glaring at a college punk who did not appreciate the wisdom of the commander-in-chief. The cartoon was originally a jibe at diehard Richard Nixon supporters. But since then, the notion that government is smarter than it seems has become the mantra of many social scientists, editorial writers, and pundits.

Paternalism is fashionable in part because it is self-evident — at least inside the Washington, D.C., beltway — that Washingtonians are superior to the rest of the nation. But the paternalist calculus only works if one assumes that the paternalist class is composed of saints untouched by the self-interest, vanity, or vindictiveness that trademark other humans. Paternalism requires the illusion that the political-bureaucratic class has no motivation except serving humanity. In reality, the self-interest of the paternalists leads them to exaggerate their successes, hide their failures, and multiply their prerogatives.

In the same way that premodern political orders presumed that kings and aristocrats were innately superior to peasants, so today’s leviathan requires assuming that bureaucrats are vastly more proficient than private citizens. But it is not sufficient to show that government policymakers have more years of education or more graduate degrees than private citizens. Instead, paternalists need to prove that government officials are almost as superior to average citizens as zookeepers are to caged animals.

Contemporary paternalists presume that citizens will benefit even when policymakers do not know what they are doing. Champions of government intervention tend to focus solely on the mental and moral defects of private citizens and markets. Philosophy professor Sarah Conly, in a 2013 New York Times op-ed headlined, “Three Cheers for the Nanny State,” noted that an “enormous amount of study over the past few decades [shows] that we are all prone to identifiable and predictable miscalculations.” Conly declared that people suffer from “cognitive bias. A lot of times we have a good idea of where we want to go, but a really terrible idea of how to get there.”

But private follies do not magically generate official wisdom. Niclas Berggrena, a Swedish economist, analyzed proposals for government intervention in 2012 and found that 95 percent of paternalist proposals “do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers.” His study noted that propaternalist economists “simply assume that one set of actors [politicians and bureaucrats] is free from irrationality…. Political actors were assumed by many economists to be benevolent maximizers of a social welfare function.” Many of the articles that Berggrena analyzed were cited by Cass Sunstein, one of the most prominent paternalists and the Obama White House’s “regulatory czar” and a zealot for government “nudges.”

The disaster of public housing

The pretenses of paternalism are tricky to reconcile with the record of federal agencies. In 1934, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes promised that, thanks to the Roosevelt administration’s public housing program, “Our children will become healthier men and women. There will be a reduction in crime.” But public housing quickly became notorious as the most dangerous locale in many cities. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) conceded in 1979 that some public housing projects had crime rates 20 times higher than the national average. George Sternlieb, director of the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University, observed in 1982 that public housing creates “a moral and psychological bankruptcy” in “the people who live in it.”

Though public housing is routinely a social disaster, it is often a political success. In Chicago, city aldermen long resisted efforts to raze high-rise housing hells and replace them with smaller housing units. Public housing blocks were advantageous for politicians — even if the police refused to enter them because of sniper fire. As the Chicago Tribune noted, tenants in Chicago Housing Authority high-rises “were beholden to the [local political] machine for the very roofs over their heads.”

In 1994, the National Academy of Public Administration declared that if HUD was not operating “in an effective, accountable manner” within five years, “the President and Congress should seriously consider dismantling the department and moving its programs elsewhere.” HUD continued floundering long after that five-year benchmark. In 2011, the Washington Post compiled hundreds of satellite images to prove that HUD’s largest home-building program was a “dysfunctional system that delivers billions of dollars to local housing agencies with few rules, safeguards or even a reliable way to track projects.” HUD claimed to have no idea that billions of dollars of its grants had been misused. HUD ignored a barrage of complaints from individuals whose neighborhoods were harmed and property devalued by its nondevelopment debacles. The Post noted that HUD “has largely looked the other way: It does not track the pace of construction and often fails to spot defunct deals, instead trusting local agencies to police projects. The result is a trail of failed developments in every corner of the country. Fields where apartment complexes were promised are empty and neglected. Houses that were supposed to be renovated are boarded up and crumbling, eyesores in decaying neighborhoods.”

A cycle of violence

Government routinely blindfolds both itself and its victims. In 1985, the District of Columbia enacted the Youth Rehabilitation Act to expunge the criminal records and avoid giving harsh sentences to offenders under the age of 22. That law, sparked by concern about the high incarceration rate of black males, helps generate some of America’s highest homicide rates. Between 2010 and 2016, 121 offenders who previously received wrist slaps under that Youth Act were charged with murder. The D.C. government and its judges did not even bother tracking subsequent crimes by recipients of Youth Act sentences. As a result, the “cycle of violence has been largely shrouded from public view or oversight,” the Washington Post noted. The toll was exposed only after the Post created software to extract details of every D.C. criminal case since 2010.

The federal government shares the blame for D.C. carnage. In 1997, as part of a budget bailout for the District of Columbia, Congress took over the D.C. parole system and created the federal Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA). The federally funded agency routinely fails to notify D.C. police when offenders vanish or otherwise violate the terms of their parole. Almost 1,500 violent crimes were committed by CSOSA-supervised offenders in 2016. CSOSA even ignored the fact that parolees routinely disabled their GPS monitor devices until one of its “clients” (as the agency calls its parolees) brutally raped a college professor in 2016. The Post noted, “About once a week, a D.C. offender under federal supervision ends up as either a victim or a suspect in a homicide investigation…. By August 2015, nearly half of the suspects that D.C. police were charging in killings were offenders under the supervision of CSOSA or were free pending trial.” The CSOSA refused to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Post seeking data on recidivism by its “clients.” CSOSA director Nancy Ware explained her agency’s leniency: “With our population, we want to give them the benefit of the doubt.” But hapless District residents receive no such “benefit of the doubt” from violent predators.

Smokescreens and deception 

Some federal agencies emit smokescreens that completely envelop their operations. In 2011, Defense Secretary Robert Gates lamented his failure to curb Pentagon waste: “My staff and I learned that it was nearly impossible to get accurate information and answers to questions such as ‘How much money do you spend?’ and ‘how many people do you have?’” Chuck Hagel, who became Defense Secretary in 2013, fought the same battle. In 2014, consultants brought in by the Defense Business Board quickly discovered $125 billion in bureaucratic waste. The Washington Post reported, “Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.” The study revealed far more outsiders on the payroll than previously suspected. For instance, “the Army employed 199,661 full-time contractors,” which “exceeded the combined civil workforce for the Departments of State, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development.” The report also revealed that “the average administrative job at the Pentagon was costing taxpayers more than $200,000 [a year], including salary and benefits.” After Hagel resigned as secretary in 2015, Pentagon leaders disavowed the study and resumed their regularly scheduled pleading of budgetary poverty.

The arrogance of the elite

Regardless of the perennial pratfalls of agencies like HUD and the Pentagon, many academics tacitly presume that the federal government is guided by a “brain trust.” That term was first showcased during Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign. Once he took office, he appointed supposedly the smartest people in the land to solve the nation’s problems. Most of the original brain trust were lawyers whose heavy-handed economic interventions produced more chaos than prosperity. But their faith in massive federal spending remained unshaken. As FDR’s team floundered, “brain trust” became a derisive label for arrogant policymakers.

Because most Americans are slackers on history, the Roosevelt administration did not permanently destroy the credibility of a federal “brain trust.” Citizens are still encouraged to believe that there are people smart enough to solve all the problems politicians create. Forty-nine percent of Americans favor “having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country,” according to a 2011 poll. The survey respondents did not specify which army or nuclear warheads the experts would use to enforce their judgments.

Actually, the type of experts trumpeted by the media perennially offer dreadful advice. Philip Tetlock, a University of California research psychologist, analyzed 82,000 predictions made over a 20-year period by 284 widely recognized political experts. In his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment, Tetlock found that experts’ predictions were “only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.” Tetlock noted “a perversely inverse relationship between indicators of good judgment and the qualities the media prizes in pundits.” In Washington, a reputation for wisdom suffices for a grasp of the facts. Experts achieve prominence thanks to their swagger and bluster, not their foresight. As long as experts err in favor of Leviathan, their blunders are speedily expunged.

The policy elite, despite their credentials, routinely ignore the “lessons of history” that they piously invoke. Even worse, experts are biased in favor of government interventions that put them in the spotlight. For instance, members of the Council on Foreign Relations are consistently far more enthused about launching foreign wars than the American public. Leslie Gelb, a former top State Department official and one of the most prominent council members, confessed in 2009: “My initial support for the war [in Iraq] was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility. We ‘experts’ have a lot to fix about ourselves.”

Omniscient paternalism

The Washington area has more certified experts per square mile than anywhere on earth. The District of Columbia has 120 times more political scientists per capita than the rest of the nation. But rather than producing “good governance,” the 3,200 political scientists and legions of other would-be Brain Trusters provide endless pretexts to further extend the federal sway.

In 1956, Soviet ruler Nikita Khrushchev, in a secret speech condemning the late Josef Stalin, denounced the establishment of a cult presuming that a ruler “supposedly knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do anything, is infallible in his behavior.” Contemporary political scientists eschew Stalinist assumptions to justify government interventions. Instead, they tacitly assume the existence of endless mini-Stalins, ready and able to take the helm of every new program. As a result, America is becoming a caretaker democracy in which rulers dupe and punish citizens for their own good.

Paternalism requires degrading assumptions about citizens and deluded assumptions about rulers. But the friends of leviathan have never proffered a cure for the blind spot at the core of their salvation scheme. As novelist Upton Sinclair quipped in 1935, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Paternalism is a desperate gamble that lying politicians will honestly care for those who fall under their power.

James Bovard is a policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation and is the author of the ebook Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty, published by FFF, his new book, Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty, and nine other books.