Brownstone Institute
Kheriaty vs. University of California

From the Brownstone Institute
BY
Shortly after I published the Wall Street Journal piece arguing that university vaccine mandates were unethical, the University of California, my employer, promulgated its vaccine mandate. I decided then it was time to put a stake in the ground: I filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the university’s vaccine mandate on behalf of COVID-recovered individuals. It was already clear from many robust studies that natural immunity following infection was superior to vaccine-mediated immunity in terms of efficacy and duration of immunity.
At the time I was an unlikely candidate to challenge the prevailing vaccination policies. I was deeply embedded in the academic medical establishment, where I had spent my entire career. In my capacity as a psychiatric consultant on the medical wards and in the emergency department, I had suited up in PPE (personal protective equipment) to see hundreds of hospitalized COVID patients, witnessing the worst that this illness can do. Nobody needed to explain to me how bad this virus could be for some individuals, especially the elderly with co-occurring medical conditions who were at significant risk of bad outcomes when infected.
I contracted the virus in July 2020, and despite my efforts to self-isolate, passed it to my wife and five children. Living and breathing COVID for a year, I eagerly awaited a safe and effective vaccine for those that were still not immune to this virus. I happily served on the Orange County COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, and I advocated in the Los Angeles Times that the elderly and sick be prioritized for vaccination, and that the poor, disabled, and underserved be given ready access to vaccines.
I had worked every day for over a year to develop and advance the university’s and state’s pandemic mitigation measures. But as the prevailing COVID policies unfolded, I became increasingly concerned, and eventually disillusioned. Our one-size-fits-all coercive mandates failed to take account of individualized risks and benefits, particularly age-stratified risks, which are central to the practice of good medicine. We ignored foundational principles of public health, like transparency and the health of the entire population. With little resistance we abandoned foundational ethical principles.
Among the most glaring failures of our response to COVID was the refusal to acknowledge the natural immunity of COVID-recovered patients in our mitigation strategies, herd-immunity estimates, and vaccine-rollout plans. The CDC estimated that by May 2021, more than 120 million Americans (36 percent) had been infected with COVID. Following the Delta-variant wave later that year, many epidemiologists estimated the number was close to half of all Americans. By the end of the Omicron wave in early 2022, that number was north of 70 percent. The good news — almost never mentioned — was that those with previous infection had more durable and longer-lasting immunity than the vaccinated. Yet the focus remained exclusively on vaccines.
As I argued in a coauthored article, medical exemptions for most vaccine mandates were too narrowly tailored, constraining physicians’ discretionary judgment and seriously compromising individualized patient care. Most mandates only allowed medical exemptions for conditions included on the CDC’s list of contraindications to the vaccines — a list that was never meant to be comprehensive. CDC recommendations should never have been taken as sound medical advice applicable to every patient.
Further exacerbating this problem, on August 17, 2021, all licensed physicians in California received a notification from the state medical board with the heading “Inappropriate Exemptions May Subject Physicians to Discipline.” Physicians were informed that any doctor granting an inappropriate mask exemption or other COVID-related exemptions “may be subjecting their license to disciplinary action.” In what was perhaps a deliberate omission, the “standard of care” criteria for vaccine exemptions was never defined by the medical board. In my eighteen years as a licensed physician, I had never previously received any such notice, nor had my colleagues.
The effect was chilling: since physicians naturally interpreted “other exemptions” to include vaccines, it became de facto impossible to find a doctor in California willing to write a medical exemption, even if the patient had a legitimate contraindication to the COVID vaccines. One of my patients was told by his rheumatologist he should not get the COVID vaccine, since he was at low risk from COVID and in this physician’s judgment his autoimmune condition elevated his risks of vaccine adverse effects.
This patient, who was subjected to a vaccine mandate at work, immediately asked this same physician for a medical exemption. The doctor replied, “I’m sorry, I cannot write you an exemption because I’m afraid I might lose my license.” I heard many stories of similar egregious violations of medical ethics under these repressive mandates and the enforcement regime that bolstered them.
As the vaccines rolled out in 2021, I spoke to many students, faculty, residents, staff, and patients who were aware of these basic immunological facts and were asking legitimate questions about vaccine mandates. Many correctly saw no medical or public health justification for subjecting themselves to the risks of the novel vaccines when they already had superior natural immunity. Others had moral concerns but did not qualify for a religious exemption, because religion was not central to their conscience-based objections.
They felt intimidated, disempowered, and vulnerable in the face of immense pressure to go along. Many physicians and nurses were afraid to speak up in the climate of coercion. Public health officials ignored inconvenient scientific findings, suppressed reasonable questions, and bullied into silence any skeptical physicians or scientists. Institutions promulgating mandates stigmatized and punished those who refused to comply. I had never seen anything like this in medicine.
Why did I file a lawsuit in federal court against my own employer? I had nothing to gain personally by this and a lot to lose professionally. I decided I could not stand by and watch the ethical disaster unfold around me without attempting to do something. In my position as Director of Medical Ethics at UCI, I had a duty to represent those whose voices were silenced and to insist upon the right of informed consent and informed refusal.
In the end, my decision to challenge these mandates came down to this question: How could I continue to call myself a medical ethicist if I failed to do what I was convinced was morally right under pressure? Projecting ahead to the required medical ethics course I taught to first and second-year medical students at the beginning of each year, I could not imagine lecturing on informed consent, moral courage, and our duty to protect patients from harm if I had failed to oppose these unjust and unscientific mandates. I simply would not have woken up each day with a clear conscience.
The university did not take kindly to my legal challenge, as you might imagine. Administrators allowed no grass to grow under their feet before responding to this dissident within the ranks. I had petitioned the court for a preliminary injunction to put the vaccine mandate on hold while the case was litigated in court. The judge declined this request, and the following day the university placed me on “investigatory leave” for alleged noncompliance with the vaccine mandate. Instead of waiting for the federal court to decide my case, the university immediately banned me from working on campus or working from home.
I was given no opportunity to contact my patients, students, residents, or colleagues and let them know I would suddenly disappear. An email from one of the deans, sent after I had left the office for the day, informed me that I could not return to campus the following day.
As I drove away from campus for the last time that day, I glanced at the sign on the corner near the hospital. The sign, which had been up for months, read in large block letters, HEROES WORK HERE.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Brownstone Institute
If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

From the Brownstone Institute
By
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Brownstone Institute
The New Enthusiasm for Slaughter

From the Brownstone Institute
By
What War Means
My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.
Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.
It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.
People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.
Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.
I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.
The EU Reverses Its Focus
When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.
Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.
We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.
In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”
The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.
As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?
Europe’s Need for Outside Help
A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.
Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.
Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.
Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.
There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.
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