Defense beyond defense
Bob Zadek introduces the concept through the naming of the Department of Defense itself: the agency is called the Department of Defense “not by accident,” and a citizen may reasonably assume it will spend its money solely on defense Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017). What troubles him is that the one goal foreign bases do not deliver, in his reading of the conversation, is better defense, because there is no threat to the United States in any of the 70 countries where bases sit. He calls this “mission creep on steroids” — the department spending between $60 billion and $120 billion a year on something beyond both its stated mission and its name, and he asks whether anyone in government or Congress examines the question.
John Glaser supplies the history. Overseas military presence existed in earlier decades and centuries, he says, but it was in 1945 that the United States began placing military bases all over the world, an inflection point at which the military, foreign policy and political establishments in Washington began defining U.S. interests expansively: no longer protecting the country from foreign attack, but protecting 70 or 80 countries with formal defense treaties or security arrangements, or more informal ones Rethinking Pax Americana with John Glaser (2017). He groups two strategic justifications — deterrence and reassurance — as the ones supposed to make the world more peaceful, and says he thinks the postwar reduction in interstate violence happened for other reasons. The explanation he offers is a foreign policy establishment that believes the United States must play global policeman, go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” in John Quincy Adams’s words, prevent war in distant areas and solve distant disputes that are not strategically important.
Bob’s framing and Glaser’s history are distinct claims, and the excerpt keeps them distinct: Bob argues from the agency’s name to its budget; Glaser argues from an establishment’s self-definition to its commitments.
Antitrust as a weapon
A second use of the phrase appears in a discussion of big tech. Bob Zadek argues that animus against big tech is not about consumer harm but about political issues — information the platforms bar, complaints from conservatives that algorithms tilt left, privacy and exposure to ideas — and that this has nothing to do with monopoly, since no entity can monopolize information available to anyone on the planet Antitrust 101 with Ryan Young (2019).
Ryan Young agrees and sharpens it. On the right, he says, the current antitrust push is not economic or consumer-oriented but personal: President Trump has a personal beef with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, partly because Bezos owns the Washington Post, which is often critical of the president, and the president has said other companies such as Time Warner, parent of CNN, also have possible antitrust concerns because of their political coverage rather than how their business affects consumer welfare Antitrust 101 with Ryan Young (2019). Young calls this “mission creep” — antitrust wielded as a potential weapon for competition-unrelated reasons — and says both left and right should stop doing it and watch for it.
Here mission creep runs in the opposite direction from the defense case: instead of an agency growing past its purpose, a body of law is stretched to serve purposes its consumer-welfare rationale does not license.
The movement that lost its focus
Amity Shlaes applies the term to Martin Luther King. She says King “had mission creep”: the best part of the student movement and of King’s movement was the work in the South, where change needed to come and did come; then the movement was translated to the North Close Enough to Socialism: Amity Schlaes on The Great Society (2019). She recalls King spending time in Chicago trying to desegregate housing, working particularly on landlords, in a city where a culture of covenants persisted though the law had shifted — a less well-defined project. He also marched against poverty, and in the later years, she says, there was a blurring of his vision and work; leaders change.
She names Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers as an ally: the UAW helped bail King out of the Birmingham jail, and the unions wanted a bigger campaign — not just voting rights in the South or an end to lynching there, but everything equal everywhere. That, she says, was where the movement was turning, and these movements lost their focus when they did that, because economic change is generally up to the individual, not to government, and usually is not brought about by a new law.
Bob Zadek’s own contribution in this episode is the framing of the discussion to come — whether Lyndon Johnson was a socialist, what his policies were, and what can be learned about socialism in its former and present form for voters in the 2020 election — rather than a use of the term.
Police power and the ratchet
The strongest concentration of the concept comes in the Portland episode, where Bob Zadek and Pat Eddington discuss the deployment of federal agents as a test case for expanded federal police power. The episode’s summary names the historical erosion of local criminal law, the mission creep of the Department of Homeland Security, and the “100-mile border zone” that grants federal agents broad search and seizure powers over a majority of the population.
Bob’s argument is constitutional in form. Stops by CBP 100 miles from the border, he says, would violate the First and Fourth Amendments if conducted by a police force, so something per se unconstitutional is performed under the protective umbrella of an ill-advised Supreme Court decision The “Ratchet Effect” in Real Time (2020). That, he says, is how it always starts — the nose under the tent — with a federal government spending its time looking for ways to expand federal power, here in contravention of protections in the Bill of Rights. He then calls the phenomenon mission creep, adds that this is almost too modest a term, and asks Eddington whether the seizure of federal police power is recent, when it began, and where in the arc of federal growth the country now stands. He notes that police power is where government and citizens interact most frequently, and cites Portland as the witness.
The exchange shows the term at its most elastic: it covers both an agency exceeding its mission and a doctrine allowing it to do so.
Corporations, charity and specialization
Mission creep also appears in a business-ethics conversation. Bob Zadek poses a hypothetical from his law-school corporate course: it is nearly indefensible for a corporation to give money to charity, because shareholders gave the corporation money for a return, not to accomplish a social good, and a corporation giving away that money forces him to support a charity he may not want to support Stakeholder Value: A New Story About Business (2021).
Ed Freeman pushes back on several fronts. Markets work when people have only strictly economic preferences, he says, and they do not capture moral preferences; the shareholder, moreover, has not given a penny to the corporation — he bought a piece of paper someone else sold. Corporations, in law, own themselves, so the idea that shareholders own the corporation is, in his understanding, a myth. He does not buy the narrative that it is about owning property.
Bob then turns to Cisco Systems, which he says gave $50 million to Santa Clara County to fight chronic homelessness in a public-private partnership and another $10 million to a local community development institute. He asks whether that is a good example. Freeman answers that companies need partners for projects they do not know how to do, and that partnering with NGOs in stakeholder partnerships makes them more effective — that is what he takes Cisco to have done.
Bob’s worry is the term: Cisco does not offer itself to investors as knowledgeable in curing homelessness, and he suspects it has no homelessness department. Curing homelessness is complicated, government mismanages the problem, and Cisco’s $50 million might reward the government that caused it. Government is not good at earning a return — he names Solyndra as the classic example — but it may be good at running a court system and protecting person and property, its core mission. He asks whether Freeman is fuzzing core missions, urging corporations to take on responsibilities of government or charities, and says that once you have mission creep, performance is hard to measure. His prescription is specialization: corporations, governments, and nonprofits each doing what they do best.
Freeman answers that corporations should do what they do best — creating value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and the people with the money — and that this is what they have always done best, even if unrecognized, like the Molière character discovering he speaks prose. He rejects the idea that the purpose of a company is to make as much money as possible: businesses need profits as a person needs red blood cells, but that is not the purpose of the life. Entrepreneurs do not start businesses just to make money — if you want to get rich, get a job. There is nothing wrong with making a lot of money, but the stakeholder idea gives a more nuanced understanding, because interests are interconnected. The Power of And, he says, tries to show how purpose and profit, stakeholders and shareholders, ethics and business connect; Friedman saw the connection but did not go far enough, since he said you cannot violate ethical custom, and gets lambasted as denying business ethics when that is not his view.
The disagreement is precise: Bob fears that adding responsibilities blurs a corporation’s core mission and makes performance unmeasurable; Freeman denies the premise that profit is the purpose, so nothing is being blurred.
Student lending and the defense cover
In the student-loan episode, Bob Zadek ties mission creep to a recurring political device. He notes that when the federal government was not involved in highway construction at all, President Eisenhower, a former military general attentive to defense, initiated the interstate highway system, and the justification was national defense: troops in trucks had to cross the country in a hurry lest the West Coast be invaded The Truth About the Student Loan Crisis (2021). National defense, he says, is the cover — the political cover — for government to enter a new activity, and once you are in, you are in, and then you have mission creep. He observes that now Biden is providing $400 billion to fix potholes, digressing to recall Senator D’Amato of New York, nicknamed “Pothole” for his focus on Long Island’s potholes.
He then frames the program he and his guest are discussing: the federal government is now in the thick of making student loans, and, he reminds the audience, when it makes these quote loans there is no credit check, no discussion of whether the loan makes credit or economic sense, but “anybody who has a pulse gets the money,” with no control over how the money is spent other than giving it to colleges and universities. He also notes the terminological looseness of calling them loans at all: in a loan, money is temporarily rented with an obligation to repay, but with student loans the money goes out and does not quite come back, making them optional-repayment loans short of compulsion. His contrast is between a core mission — courts, person, property — and an activity the federal government entered under a defense rationale and never left.
Across episodes: what changed
The term recurs across episodes with no single settled meaning, and the excerpts show no development from an earlier to a later treatment. In the two episodes where it anchors a sustained argument, the 2017 defense conversation and the 2021 student-loan conversation, the mechanism is identical — a defense rationale opens the door and the activity stays — but the subjects differ and neither guest engages the other’s case. The 2019 antitrust and 2019 Great Society excerpts use it in passing, attributed to Ryan Young and Amity Shlaes respectively; the 2020 Portland and 2021 stakeholder exchanges give it to Bob Zadek himself, and the stakeholder exchange turns on whether the term applies at all, with Freeman rejecting the premise that profit is the corporation’s purpose. Portions of the excerpts break off mid-sentence — Bob’s question after the 2017 instability heading, his question after the 2021 Cisco heading, and the tail of the student-loan passage — so the replies are not in the record.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts state no definition of mission creep that the speakers share, and no episode resolves whether the concept describes bureaucratic drift, political opportunism, or both. The federal base count, the composition of Pentagon spending, the legal basis of the border-zone doctrine, the outcome of any antitrust action against big tech, and the fate of the student-loan program are all left where the speakers leave them. Several segments end mid-sentence, so the responding half of those exchanges is absent, and the Portland episode is represented here only by its summary and one exchange.