A retired New Zealand member of Parliament, Rodney Hide, famously said that he went into politics a libertarian and came out an anarchist. Military historian Mark Moyar went into the Donald Trump administration as a political appointee with USAID, and his experience would turn almost anyone into a secessionist and noninterventionist.
Moyar’s story, Masters of Corruption: How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the Trump Presidency (248 pages, 2024), smacks as cartoonish. It seems like something you would read as a satirical Babylon Bee headline: “Conservative Goes to DC, Learns Everyone There Is a Pathological Liar.”
Duh, you might say, but rule-following Moyar, now a Hillsdale College professor, learned the hard way. His story is an antidote to anyone who dreams of accountability or reform from within the ranks of the permanent bureaucracy. Moyar’s story should also temper any optimism for GOP-led foreign aid and development initiatives, AKA conservative internationalism.
The Enemies Within
Masters of Corruption covers a lot of ground and is not easy reading (or 11 hours of listening). Above all, it conveys how the nation’s power centers, especially the bureaucracy in Washington, DC, have been captured by enemies of US values.
Moyar explains how his conservative tendencies essentially ruled him out of academia. The limited exceptions were some military institutions and parallel institutions such as Patrick Henry College and Wyoming Catholic College, which receive no taxpayer funding. He addressed this quagmire in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2024. Students asked him about the restoration of a conservative presence on college campuses: “Believing it my duty to provide the unvarnished truth, I replied that I could not see it happening in my lifetime. The boomers had succeeded in hiring professors from Generation X who shared their commitment to excluding the right.”
Moyar holds a doctorate in history from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and he has been a prolific author and policy researcher. Unlike so many beltway conservatives and GOP insiders (RINOs), he refrained from condemning Donald Trump’s campaign for the US presidency. Moyar initially backed Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) but was open to Trump and was in a strong position to receive a political appointment.
However, Moyar soon realized he was on the backfoot from the get-go. RINOS, and even never-Trumpers, proved to be chameleons and more competent at pulling strings to land roles. Eventually, Moyar received a position with USAID and had a short stint as director of the Office of Civilian-Military Cooperation. What does that office do, you might ask? The array of ridiculous and pompous titles, acronyms, and offices he details—the notorious alphabet soup—makes one wonder: what on earth is the point of it all?
The Worst Rise to the Top
Moyar shares that some federal employers do have a desire to carry out the objectives of elected officials. However, more than 90 percent of his colleagues were inclined towards the Democrat Party, and those with good intentions seemed to lose out to the sociopaths hellbent on forming alliances and accumulating largess. The name of the game appears to be empire building, and Moyar often shares names. In particular, Robert Jenkins and John Voorhees show themselves to be swamp-creature snakes who thwarted Moyar’s efforts to maintain some semblance of standards and accountability.
As you can guess, the insiders were immediately suspicious of someone who could disrupt the gravy train. Does he not realize that this is all for show? Unfortunately, Moyar notes that even the Trump appointees, in general, avoided retribution and just went along with laziness, corruption, opaqueness, and hijacking of taxpayer resources for progressive causes and self-aggrandizement.
Jenkins, for example, shared in a meeting how he and his colleagues were hiding and renaming projects to pull the wool over the Trump administration’s eyes and circumvent policy priorities. No one raised an eyebrow. Moyar states that smooth-talking federal officials love do-nothing meetings, but they struggle to provide more than lofty buzzwords when asked to write anything down and make concrete plans.
You can predict what comes next. Moyar, after reporting multiple instances of corruption, found his security clearance revoked and himself out of a job in no time. Reporting the whistleblower retaliation to the USAID Office of Inspector General led nowhere and revealed only how these supposed watchdogs have formed their own clique of corruption. His story gives new meaning to the question, who will police the police?
Picking Up the Wreckage
Moyar provides intricate, and at times dry, details of his back-and-forth efforts to defend his reputation and maintain his respect for the rule of law in the United States. However, time marched on, and soon Trump was out of office, so any reinstatement was moot. Moyar accepted his Hillsdale role and did his best to simply clear his name of any purported wrongdoing: a contrived case of revealing classified information. The reality was that his book, Oppose Any Foe: The Rise of America’s Special Operations Forces (432 pages, 2017), only shared information already in the public domain. Further, Moyar had gone to great lengths to comply with an archaic prepublication review that did not happen until years later when permanent bureaucrats wanted to spite him.
Each reader will draw his own conclusions from Moyar’s story, but his take-home is that the United States needs a revitalization of civic virtues—although that is easier said than done. He observes a lack of religious or moral unity, which shows up especially in federal institutions: “toxic people have always gravitated to government, because it is the easiest place for them to function and thrive.” (See his appearance on the Impunity Observer podcast to go straight to the horse’s mouth.)
Further, there need to be suitable stepping-stone organizations to nourish an aristocracy that respects and defends US values such as limited government and individualism. The Ben Franklin Fellowship, somewhat akin to the Federalist Society, is one such organization at least attempting to foster such values in foreign-policy officials and counter the likes of the Truman National Security Project.
Moyar’s direct experience, though, suggests any such organizations—especially those that align closely with the GOP—are likely to be coopted by social-climbing grifters, albeit with different branding. In addition, those already burrowed into the federal bureaucracy have seemingly endless tricks up their sleeves to sabotage and impede policy reforms, hence the need for external resistance such as state-led nullification.
