A longer version of this post originally appeared on the “Can We Still Govern?” Substack.
The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government began its business last week with an opening hearing replaying old grievances of how Donald Trump had been mistreated. So stale was the hearing that the star witness was an FBI whistleblower who turned out to have left government in the last century.
What is more interesting than the hearing is the way in which the idea of “weaponization” itself has emerged and been, well, weaponized.
The idea of weaponization is not new. You can find the term in past Fox News coverage, for example, including as early as 2017.
“Weaponization” of course implies a martial aspect. It is similar to the linguistic trick of calling the Biden administration the “Biden regime” to evoke an illiberal approach to governing. It carries the whiff of a rogue state implementing Stasi-like operations to suppress dissent. “Federal agencies have a long and sordid history of illegally targeting American citizens to gain political advantage,” writes the Center for Renewing America in one recent example. “Government agencies like (but not limited to) the FBI, DHS, and DOJ are actively working to silence and suppress citizens who subscribe to ideas that differ from the regimes’.”
You probably have not heard of the Center for Renewing America, but it offers an important insight into both the origins and meaning of the weaponization trope.
The Center for Renewing America is a Trump-aligned think tank. As best as I can tell, the center promoted the idea of a weaponization committee in the form it has now taken before anyone else. Last October, characterizing the idea as a “Church-style” committee, the center stated: “we call on Members of Congress to assemble a stand-alone committee with broad investigative powers focused on woke and weaponized agencies and personnel within the federal government.” GOP hardliners who opposed Kevin McCarthy’s speakership bid used similar terminology when they successfully demanded, in a Dec. 8 letter, that McCarthy: “Form a ‘Church Commission’-Style Committee to Target Weaponized Government.”
The Center for Renewing America is led by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and the former head of Trump’s budget office. Vought has not just helped to popularize the “weaponization” trope (he has been using this language since at least 2021), but he also embodies its intent and hypocrisies.
Vought is an extreme partisan who, when given the chance to govern, damaged the institutions of government. He weaponized government in the worst ways while in power:
• As the Office of Management and Budget chief, Vought pushed the Schedule F executive order that would have made it possible to fire career employees for political reasons.
• Vought OK’d the withholding of aid to Ukraine even though his career OMB lawyers warned him it was illegal.
• Weeks after it was clear that Trump had lost the election, Vought blocked career officials from cooperating with the Biden transition at a crucial moment during the pandemic.
So that is Vought when working in government.
When out of power, Vought characterized legitimate uses of government power as “weaponization,” such as when the FBI searched, under court order, the home of a key player in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. Vought is now building an “army” of far-right ideologues with a “biblical worldview” to take control of federal agencies when a Republican administration returns to power. Vought told Axios: “We are consciously bringing on the toughest and most courageous fighters with the know-how and credibility to crush the deep state.”
The “weaponization” trope therefore originates from the far right of American politics. It serves the conspiratorial and anti-statist element of the Republican Party in several ways.
At a prosaic political level, an oversight committee generates headlines that damage your political opponents and show your base you are taking their concerns seriously. The formalization of the weaponization trope does so in a way that gives Republicans the opportunity to mainline conspiracy theories.
“Weaponization” also serves to strengthen a victimhood narrative that is the hallmark of dangerous populist movements, reinforcing the idea that the deep state is seeking to steal not just your elections, but your entire way of life.
Accusations of weaponization further help to “work the ref”—that is, to give policy decisionmakers reason to pause if they take action against legitimate targets. For example, during the Obama administration, the IRS targeted political groups claiming a tax deduction on the fiction that they were “social welfare” groups not actively involved in politics. It targeted both conservatives and liberals, but the outrage was all on the conservative side. IRS budgets were cut. As a result, the agency has largely given up on policing violations of tax law by political activists, to the point that what seem like obvious misdeeds go unpunished.
Policymakers will know that if they take regulatory, investigative, or police action that intrudes on conservative stakeholders, they will be accused of weaponization. Hearings and subpoenas will follow, such as the ones now faced by Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona because of investigations into harassment of school officials that Republicans characterized as an infringement on free speech.
The weaponization trope also helps to selectively ignore the misuse of government power, largely by Republicans, that has fueled American democratic backsliding. Supporters focus on the alleged misdeeds of their enemies, while the media will be pulled into a perpetual cycle of whataboutism if they accurately castigate one side as being more guilty than the other of abuses.
Discrediting government also provides Republicans a populist logic for disempowering those within it that they distrust, such as the career bureaucracy, and justifies asserting loyalty to narrow partisan values as a primary governing value.
This, ultimately, is the payoff of the weaponization trope: To save government, we must burn it down, and rebuild from the ashes. Illustrating these anti-statist tactics, Russ Vought released a budget blueprint for the new GOP House to follow. It relies on culture-war tropes as a means to deconstruct much of the state. While mentioning “woke” 77 times, and “weaponize(d)” 42 times, it calls for massive cuts in federal discretionary programs: $9 trillion over the course of a decade.
Vought’s budget is also explicitly pro-weaponization. While calling for cuts to parts of the FBI that monitor extremist groups, it advocates for a $618 million increase for FBI investigations of progressives: “to thwart the increasing societal destruction caused by progressive policies at the state and local levels that have defunded police, refused to prosecute criminals, and released violent felons into communities.”
Vought reflects the emerging view on the far right that the era of small government conservatism is over: Instead, hard-right populists feel that they should actively take control of government to pursue their goals. This helps to explain the right-wing adoration of Victor Orbán in Hungary, and serves as the basis for the DeSantis rise in the Republican Party. John Daniel Davidson wrote an essay in the Federalist summarizing this view, titled “We Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives”:
To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.
In other contexts, wielding government power will mean a dramatic expansion of the criminal code. It will not be enough, for example, to reach an accommodation with the abortion regime, to agree on “reasonable limits” on when unborn human life can be snuffed out with impunity.
All of this sounds an awful lot like the weaponization of government, free of concerns about individual rights.
