In ancient Greece, King Augeas had the largest herds of any kingdom—over a thousand cattle, plus sheep and goats. According to an old epic poem, the cattle were housed in huge stables that had not been cleaned out for more than 30 years. A putrid, filthy mess had accumulated, and Hercules was tasked with cleaning it out in a single day. Knowing it would be futile to try to shovel it bit-by-bit, he diverted two rivers to thoroughly flush out the deep accumulated filth. When it was finally gone, he moved the rivers back to their natural beds.

It’s an appropriate metaphor for today’s desperately needed cleaning out of our Beltway swamp and its sycophant mainstream media.

But before we consider how to accomplish that, and what to do (if and when we manage to do it), it’s worth remembering just why Hercules was faced with so difficult a task.

Hercules was a semi-divine hero, the son of Zeus who was the king of the Greek gods and a mortal woman. Zeus’s wife Hera hated Hercules with a deep passion, as he was a high-visibility reminder of Zeus’s philandering. Scholars tell us that Hera wasn’t just one of the goddesses worshipped by the Greeks—she had been a top deity among the local people before the IndoEuropean Greek tribes moved into the region. Too popular simply to be ignored, the Greeks made her the queen of their top god. She had, if you will, a political and cultural constituency that could not be ignored. Hercules’s very existence was an insult to her.

Eventually Hera managed to drive Hercules mad, and, in his madness, he killed his own wife and children. When he regained his sanity, he made a pilgrimage to the Oracle of Delphi and asked the god Apollo for guidance and a way to atone. Apollo, speaking through the Oracle, told him to go serve Eurystheus, the king of Argos, for 10 years. In turn, Eurystheus assigned him 12 seemingly impossible tasks, the Labors of Hercules. Cleaning the Augean Stables (and bringing back some of Augeas’ cattle) was the fifth labor.

However, as is often the case with deep rivalries, there was more below the surface. Zeus and Hera were contesting whose champion would become the true hero who would unite the Greeks, overcome the ancient monsters, and solidify the rule of the Twelve Olympian Greek gods. Zeus’s champion was Hercules. And Hera’s champion was … Eurystheus.

Eurystheus ruled over one of the oldest cities in Europe, a city that predated the arrival of the Greeks. Ostensibly Hera was willing to see Mt. Olympus and the Greek gods confirmed in power and she had acknowledged the victory of the Greek tribes over the previous local culture—but she very much wanted it to be on her own terms and those of her non-Greek constituency. Having sabotaged Hercules with temporary madness, she managed to put him in the position of serving the very rival she intended to install instead of him. In turn, that rival did everything he could to undercut Zeus’s champion, even while Hera pretended to be cooperating with the Greeks.

Does any of this sound a bit like our situation today?

Consider what has accumulated in the U.S. over the last 90 years. FDR, coming to power during the Great Depression, initiated America’s welfare state. Conservatives back then advanced the legitimate argument that the Depression itself was triggered by fiscal policies in need of being rolled back, but the start of World War II undercut that argument. The war kept FDR in power for an unprecedented four terms, during which much of the groundwork for today’s overweening—and increasingly corrupt—beltway swamp was laid. Consider some of the actions FDR took after the welfare programs of the Depression.

First, he mobilized industry under central government control. Conservatives acquiesced since it seemed an understandable step in the face of German military and industrial buildup at the time.

Then he unilaterally created a powerful new federal agency and position without congressional input or approval, appointing Vannevar Bush to head the new Office of Scientific Research and Development reporting directly to himself. Bush, an electrical engineer and a cousin to the Bush political dynasty, had founded Raytheon Corp. and then became the first dean of engineering at MIT. Under FDR he oversaw initiatives such as the Manhattan Project that arguably were of critical importance for our victory in World War II.

But after the war things didn’t return to earlier normalcy. Using his influence, Bush successfully lobbied for creation of the National Science Foundation and for continued massive federal funding for science and technology research and development. Over time nearly every executive branch agency became a source of taxpayer dollars that increasingly went to academics and to “Beltway Bandit” federal contractors like Raytheon—with R&D focuses set by unelected agency officials. Often the results of those grants and contracts served as the basis for regulations issued by the agencies, again without congressional input beyond the very high-level agency budgets negotiated on Capitol Hill.

As the size and reach of the executive agencies grew, Congress approved a major and arguably damaging change to civil service. Until 1979, civil service employees other than senior appointees held rank and earned salary on the GS scale from GS-1 to GS-18. Presidents could and occasionally did replace key agency employees. But in 1979 the ranks of GS-16 though GS-18 were converted into Senior Executive Service (SES) ranks. Those who reached SES status became essentially untouchable and unaccountable, nearly impossible to fire and with very broad control over how their agencies spent their budgets and acted.

Creation of SES roles combined with the arms race vs. the USSR arguably enabled metastasis of the World War II / post-World War II R&D infrastructure (and increasingly the whole Beltway ecosystem) into an accumulating pile of … feces. It facilitated an increasingly corrupt revolving Beltway door for influential but unelected decision makers to move between agencies, academia, and Beltway companies, including notional nonprofit think tanks. It also subtly and sometimes not-so-subtly corrupted scientific research as academics seeking tenure sought to satisfy agency desires to gain funding. Increasingly, peer review of research publications became a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” way to pad resumes and attract grants and contracts, which in turn tightened the grip recipients had on key academic positions.

Ugh. But just as with Hercules, there’s also a behind-the-scenes story we shouldn’t ignore. Where were social and fiscal conservatives when this was happening?

They were fractured and at war with one another. Like Hercules, they came under the direction and the policies of their rivals, the progressives, via the massive federal monolith. In Congress they negotiated to get a piece of the pie for their constituents and thereby guarantee their own re-elections. Seniority in office then led to committee chair roles and increased power and influence. Backroom deals flourished, all in the name of compromise and reasonable collegiality. Outside of Congress social and fiscal conservatives fragmented into think tanks where they received salaries in return for studies, the publication of which made little impact on actual policies or elections.

Meanwhile, rapid maturation of technologies like the internet and computing shifted our industrial base, and some on both sides of the aisle began to benefit greatly from outsourcing, especially to China. George W. Bush’s response to the attacks of 9/11, facilitated by the Patriot Act, drove major nails into the coffin of domestic freedom as it increased surveillance of Americans in lieu of openly confronting aggressive Islamism. Soon CAIR (the Council on American–Islamic Relations) and ISNA (the Islamic Society of North America) were controlling important training for FBI and other agencies in the name of avoiding Islamophobia. The election of Obama to the White House sealed that deal. Then, just as he was leaving office, Obama maneuvered to get key supporters very senior SES roles in key agencies. Along with globalists in both parties, those newly minted bureaucrats successfully sabotaged and stymied Trump’s initiatives as president. Funding flowed to NGOs which weakened election safeguards for 2020.

Since then, DEI initiatives in federal agencies have hollowed out competence at the same time the Biden administration has massively increased agency powers via executive orders, including in open defiance of Supreme Court rulings.

How can we possibly clean out the reeking Augean Stables that constitute the Beltway swamp today? It will not be easy, but with a massive effort it could be possible.

First, it is necessary not only to elect a Hercules to the White House but also to support that president with a Congress that will take the necessary legislative and budgetary actions. This is an all-hands-on deck crisis. The old “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” culture on Capitol Hill must give way to a seriously focused crisis response, and that requires electing real majorities in both houses.

Second, Congress must pass significantly smaller federal budgets and authorize the president to eliminate federal jobs, most especially in the senior agency ranks. Without such a move, those officials will stonewall and sabotage the clean-out effort.

Third, new agency heads must roll back massive regulatory overreach and utilize Federal Acquisition Regulation mechanisms to end contracts, including funds flowing to NGOs.

Forth, it is critically important to secure our borders and remove undocumented aliens, especially males of military age from China, gang members from Latin America, and supporters of terrorist organizations, and their nation-state sponsors.

Fifth, along with these actions it is critically important to stop the destruction of the U.S. dollar’s value internationally. Any effort to do this can only succeed over time with significant rebuilding of our industry and economy. But at a minimum it must be an urgent priority of the Federal Reserve.

Suppose we somehow pull off all these things. Suppose we flush out the Swamp with Herculean measures akin to diverting whole rivers for a while. What then?

Then we need to rebuild on a new foundation. I’ll examine what that foundation might be and how we might begin that rebuilding in a future article. But to start, it is a life and death matter for our Republic that the accumulated fecal matter be removed and removed quickly. It has become the source of life-threatening disease for us, our country, and our freedom.