Harold Koh, fear, and post-9/11 overreaction
In the May 11, 2013 episode on war and extra-constitutional power, Bob Zadek discussed the State Department through the figure of Harold Koh, whom he described as a legal advisor in the Obama State Department, a career diplomat, and a smart fellow. Zadek said Koh had recently resigned and had “had enough,” and he read aloud a quotation he attributed to Koh: “Just because someone hates America or sympathizes with Al-Qaeda does not make them our lawful enemy.” War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013) Zadek used the resignation and the quotation to argue that the United States had built expensive counterterrorism infrastructure in response to being hated rather than to any lawful threat, calling it an overreaction.
The episode’s wider discussion of terrorism and fear provides context for that framing. Guest Chris Preble argued that terrorism is particularly fear-inducing because it combines a human will to cause harm with the intent to produce a political response. Preble also said the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are smaller than the chances of being struck by lightning or dying from a bee sting or allergic reaction, a statistic Zadek confirmed as accurate. Preble described the Boston lockdown as an overreaction, saying fugitives are hunted down all the time without shutting down cities, and noted the Boston Marathon bombing was fresh in everybody’s mind at the time. Zadek observed that it was not a terrorist attack “as best we can tell,” while Preble said the perpetrators had not communicated a motive. The State Department appears here chiefly as the institutional home of Koh and as part of a post-9/11 apparatus that the host treats as a fear-driven overreaction.
Spend it or lose it
The March 22, 2018 episode with Jonathan Bidlack examined the State Department as an example of perverse budget incentives. Zadek asked Bidlack to explain the process by which agencies allocated a certain amount in a budget are compelled to spend it, calling it a “spend it or lose it” system and warning listeners it would sound unpleasant and grotesque. Cheap Hawks; Not Cheap Talk (2018) Bidlack said the practice is not limited to the Pentagon but that the State Department is actually the most notorious, with roughly a quarter of the annual State Department budget spent in September, the last month of the fiscal year. He described agencies returning to Congress to say they had spent all the money and needed all of it plus a little bit more, creating an incentive to spend even when managers know it is wasteful.
Bidlack illustrated the point with a story he had heard secondhand about an embassy he believed was in an African country. With money left over at the end of the year, the embassy spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on potted plants and flowers rather than return to Congress and admit it had not spent the funds and therefore had not needed them. He said there had been legislative attempts to address the problem, including joint legislation by Rand Paul and Mark Warner in the last session of Congress that would have awarded bonuses to people who succeeded in coming in under budget. In this episode the State Department is not discussed as a diplomatic actor but as the clearest case of a spending culture in which funds must be used or lost.
Trafficking narratives and department reports
The March 5, 2019 episode with Elizabeth Nolan Brown considered the State Department as a source of evidence against the sex-trafficking panic. Zadek framed the hour around the idea that once government instills fear, the population cedes additional power, and asked whether sex trafficking was an invented hysteria or had any reality behind it. Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the War on Sex Workers (2019) Brown said the image of women handcuffed in shipping containers, like the Liam Neeson film Taken, or duct-taped and shipped in mass across borders, has zero evidence. She said even people at the State Department and similar institutions have said that is not the way it is happening, and that the department’s reports, when they describe what is actually happening, contain no evidence for that picture. She contrasted the official rhetoric with the reports themselves, noting the public-facing statements and the actual reports diverge.
Brown also described federal enforcement patterns. She said Operation Cross Country is one example of an annual FBI sweep joined by Homeland Security, involving hundreds of federal agents and police, which results in arrests of only about three people on Mann Act charges, which she characterized as crossing state lines. She argued the reality of violence in the sex trade looks more like domestic violence or foster care children who run away and get caught up in the wrong group, ordinary problems for which existing criminal law already provides a structure. She traced the federal anti-sex-trafficking law to 2000 and said it had been reauthorized every few years, with definitions expanding so that advertising and purchasing sex now count, and noted that no knowledge of age is not a defense. Zadek’s closing question asked whether anyone ever says the problem went away and the statute should be repealed, which he called a ratchet.
Tied aid and the politics of foreign assistance
The March 4, 2020 episode with Matt Warner discussed the State Department within a broader account of foreign aid. Zadek introduced the concept of “tied aid,” which he said exists both when Washington gives block grants or money to states and cities with strings attached and in the international foreign aid context, and asked Warner to explain how it plays into his thesis. How to leverage resources within the liberty movement (2020) Warner said a researcher in Oslo, Norway, who had won a grant from the Gates Foundation to study Norway’s foreign aid told him that when Norway became wealthy from oil production in the 1960s and 1970s, it needed a way to get its name out on the global stage and increase its foreign aid apparatus to gain entrée to government doorsteps, while also being interested in selling oil. Warner said these things always go together and are hard to parse, and that it is a natural part of the portfolio for any foreign ministry or State Department to want its businesses to be able to do business over there.
Warner argued that this dynamic too often nullifies or makes difficult the actual humanitarian and anti-poverty efforts, and said that love or hate foreign aid, people should stop pretending it will solve poverty because it is not even designed to do that. He noted the organization he represented supports more than 100 think tank partners in the United States and invests in occupational licensing domestically. Zadek added that Washington’s foreign aid often carries social concept riders such as abortion restrictions, depending on which party is in power, which he said do not export well to a Third World country, and that once the political process gets involved in deciding where grant money goes, the goals get distorted.
Populism and the hollowing out of the administrative state
The January 17, 2021 episode on populism after Trump returned to the State Department twice. Zadek asked Terry Moe about the phrase “hollowing out” of government and the administrative state, noting that Moe’s book supports the evolutionary rise of the administrative state and asking why an un-hollowed-out administrative state is a good thing even though its officials are unelected. Populism After Trump (2021) Moe said all modern governments have administrative states, which are nothing more than all the government agencies that carry out the programs of government, and that governments have programs because democracies are filled with people who experience socio-economically caused problems government is expected to solve, from antitrust to poverty programs to environmental and agricultural programs. He said the only way to have no administrative state would be to return to a primitive government in a primitive society, and that the founders did but we do not.
Moe said Trump sought to hollow out the administrative state by undermining professionalism, expertise, science, and the capacity of government to solve problems effectively. He said Trump never had a constructive domestic or international agenda and tore away at all these agencies like the State Department, causing hundreds of top-level foreign service officers to depart and crippling the department for no replacement. In the same episode, William Howell distinguished a principled effort to limit the reach of government, in which one thoughtfully scales back what government should not be doing, from what he said the populist does: lay waste to the apparatus without reducing the size of government, producing a much less effective, hollowed-out administrative state. Howell said the populist and the libertarian part company early. Moe added that critics of the administrative state should think about what kind of government a modern, complex society needs, and that the 300 million people in the country who want problems addressed are not unaccountable because they are held accountable by elected representatives at the top of government.
Across episodes: continuity and change
The excerpts show no development in how the State Department is treated across episodes; each appearance is a different angle on the same institution. In 2013 it is the home of Harold Koh and part of a post-9/11 apparatus, in 2018 the most notorious case of spend-it-or-lose-it budgeting, in 2019 a source of reports contradicting trafficking panic, in 2020 a foreign ministry naturally promoting business alongside aid, and in 2021 the agency crippled by populist attack.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the State Department’s founding, its organizational structure, its secretary or other officials, its budget totals, or any specific program beyond the examples the guests give. They do not state which city or country the embassy in Bidlack’s secondhand story was in, nor the name of the joint legislation he attributes to Rand Paul and Mark Warner, nor the name of the 2000 anti-trafficking law Brown discusses. The excerpts also do not state the outcome or holding of any case, the amendment any case turned on, or the date of Koh’s resignation, and the sections that break off mid-sentence leave those points unresolved.