Description
Review by Encounter Books Here’s an inside perspective of the federal bureaucracy, with personal intrigue and prescriptions for future ad ministrations. In the United States, you can elect any president you want, but a small group of unelected bureaucrats you’ve never heard of still run everything—year after year, administration after administration. That’s not democracy. It’s oligarchy, and Mark Moyar explains exactly how it works.
This book tells a remarkable true story of bureaucratic assassination during the first Trump presidency, revealing in vivid detail how career federal employees thwarted his efforts to drain the swamp. Moyar, a senior political appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), discovered evidence of corruption involving five career bureaucrats and reported it to agency officials in 2018. Senior bureaucrats orchestrated a sophisticated retaliatory plot, which began when a Special Ops U.S. general fraudulently accused Moyar of divulging classified information, and ended with the termination of Moyar’s employment.
The bureau that Moyar had been on track to lead, with an annual budget exceeding $300 million, fell into the hands of one of his bureaucratic assassins. The leading perpetrator of the corruption exposed by Moyar subsequently escaped punishment by transferring to another federal agency. A multi-agency cover-up fol lowed. Moyar sought help from the Offices of the Inspector General un der three different presidential ad ministrations—the government’s main bulwark against whistleblower retaliation—but all three conducted flimsy investigations that absolved the bureaucracy. When Sen. Charles Grassley de manded that agency officials fill the gaps in the government’s story, he was met with lies and evasions. This suspense-filled drama provides an in sider’s view of the federal bureaucracy’s corruption, its weaponization of bureaucratic procedures, and its failures to protect employees from retaliation. In telling his story, Moyar reveals how future administrations can drain the swamp and draws a roadmap for the restoration of integrity to the United States government—starting with USAID. Hardback, 248 pages.
