Guy Fawkes Day: Not what it used to be

Four hundred or so years ago, on Nov. 5, 1605, a plot to blow up the British Parliament failed. It was known as the Gunpowder Plot, and I’ve been burning Guy Fawkes, one of the culprits, in effigy at my home in Arlington for the past few years. The police are gracious enough to stop by on behalf of the neighbors when the fireworks get too robust.The would-be Catholic saboteurs were undone by an anonymous letter that tipped off British authorities and were executed. Guy Fawkes stands out conspicuously, not because he led the gang, but because he was the explosives expert who was caught standing guard over 36 barrels of gunpowder in a cellar beneath the House of Lords.Not long after the plot, Parliament made Nov. 5 a day of remembrance and thanksgiving, to be celebrated with bonfires as a testimony to its deliverance from oblivion. In other words, the British Parliament declared its own survival an official holiday. The official holiday ended in the mid-19th century, but failure of a would-be villain is celebrated to this day, yet public sentiment regarding Fawkes and his fellow conspirators has shifted. Today Fawkes is somewhat of a folk hero. No longer is he viewed as only a villain for trying to blast away his governors. Why? Rebranding, mostly. In 1982, the comic book V for Vendetta put Fawkes’s grinning face on an anarchist fighting a fascist Britain. The 2005 film made the mask famous, and within a few years it was the uniform of protesters from Wall Street to Cairo. Same man, same facts, different storyteller. He’s become a symbol of anti-establishment rather than a terrorist.Like it or not, the revamped image of Fawkes as anti-establishment is a natural fit for Americans fed up with the gears of a government that has delivered repeated losses in protracted shooting wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan, more than $40 trillion in debt that will turn our children and grandchildren into serfs, and federal agencies such as the inefficient and predatory Federal Emergency Management Agency, which does little more than redistribute wealth from the service and trade classes of the interior to coastal communities living a lifestyle entirely foreign to them. In his current incarnation, Fawkes is a symbol of antiestablishment rather than terrorism.Clearly, Fawkes was a would-be terrorist guarding enough gunpowder to kill the king and most of the government in one blast. I spent a while overseas engaged in America’s two-decade war on terrorism, and I was twice the assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction at the Department of Homeland Security. I have no romance for men with gunpowder and fuses.The English have an old joke about Fawkes: He was the only man ever to enter Parliament with honest intentions. That’s how I walked into FEMA — with clear intentions to shut it down or reform it within six months, ending it as we know it. And we know it to be an inefficient agency not serving the people well. I was frank about my intentions, and there was much howling and gnashing of teeth from the ranks of FEMA.FEMA headquarters has about 6,000 people parked in cubicles in Southwest Washington, D.C. My team’s analysis, some of them FEMA employees, showed that somewhere between 2,000 would do. Nobody at FEMA is a first responder. In other words, all are bureaucrats of the white-collar welfare brand. Furthermore, roughly 80,000 disaster projects across the country remain open, some dating back to Hurricane Katrina. Eighteen months after Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s governor reported that almost half of the state’s recovery projects were still stuck waiting for FEMA’s approval. FEMA employs 10,000 or so regular and reservist personnel spread around the country, mismanaging the projects. This horde lives on per diem in hotels, feasting at any Golden Corral within arm’s reach. Since leaving FEMA, I’ve had a number of former reservists contact me and tell me what a grift scheme to the American taxpayer the FEMA employee lifestyle is. There is no incentive to shut the programs down; left unresolved, they justify a federal jobs program.I told DHS headquarters I could cut its staff in half the day after I arrived at FEMA. I only needed the green light to do that and begin shutting down the 80,000 programs and reducing FEMA personnel tending them. It never came.OUTWITTING DOGE: HOW ‘THE SWAMP’ RAN OUT THE CLOCK ON ELON MUSKThis is where the new image of Fawkes fits — many across the country are fed up with agencies such as FEMA, an agency so entrenched it even outwitted DOGE. FEMA has done what permanent government jobs programs do and what Parliament did in 1606: celebrate its own survival and go back to business as usual.Remember, remember the fifth of November. Some Katrina projects are still open 21 years later. Gunpowder is no real threat to the federal bureaucracy. Reform is, and the bureaucracy knows exactly how to keep reform from happening. With government agencies such as FEMA reigning over grift and inefficiency, it’s not hard to understand how Fawkes’s image got a facelift.David Richardson served as the senior official performing the duties of administrator of FEMA. He is the author of Texas Flood: Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy and Tragedy.