From The Regulatory Review, Clifford Winston:

The Trump Administration’s hiring of academics who compromise disciplinary standards threatens effective governance.

The impending appointments by President Donald J. Trump of a new chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics threaten government performance by academic toadyism. In the interest of being close to power, either by taking a formal position in government or by advocating on behalf of an administration, academic toadies eschew the process of carefully applying the findings of precisely formulated and tested hypotheses to recommend policies that improve people’s lives. Instead, they provide unfailing support for the President’s policies even if they are harmful.

Many academics aligned with both political parties have distinguished their discipline by serving in government and providing policymakers with valuable advice. The potential harm to the public caused by academic toadies, however, has recently grown because President Trump hires only people who agree with him unconditionally and will fire anyone who he discovers disagrees with him. Thus, it is possible that President Trump’s choice of Federal Reserve chair will act on the President’s uninformed and impulsive views of the U.S. and global economy without questioning their veracity. E.J. Antoni, who holds a PhD from Northern Illinois University, is currently the chief economist at The Heritage Foundation and has just been nominated by President Trump to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni’s unsubstantiated criticism of the Bureau as needing to “rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years” confirms that he checks the right boxes.

Academic departments must alert their students to this potential problem and encourage them not to become academic toadies. I am not advocating that academics who work for the Trump Administration should be automatically cancelled. I am advocating that academic departments urge their students who eventually engage with government policymakers to understand that they have a responsibility to maintain the scientific values and standards of their academic discipline.

Because law is intertwined with public policy, the nation’s law schools are a natural home from which academics go into or serve as advocates for a presidential administration. Consider toadyism by Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz was an advocate for President Trump at his impeachment trial where the President was charged by the U.S. House of Representatives for abuse of power based on offering inappropriate quid pro quos to a foreign nation to improve his re-election chances. Dershowitz justified President Trump’s behavior because President Trump believed that his re-election was in the public interest; thus, because President Trump did something that he believed would help him get elected in the public interest, the quid pro quo was not an impeachable offense.

Dershowitz assumes that the public has revealed a preference to re-elect President Trump, and he then works backward to conclude that President Trump’s behavior must have been in the public interest. As an academic, Dershowitz knows that he should state and justify this and all of his assumptions explicitly. If Dershowitz did so, it would be clear that this assumption was false because preferences, especially those by the public in the voting booth, only are revealed ex-post, and not necessarily known ex-ante. Indeed, as an empirical matter, Dershowitz’s assumption was false because the public rejected Trump’s reelection in 2020.

Dershowitz might respond that he was defending a client in the interest of defending the U.S. Constitution. However, he was not paid for his representation and could not claim that he had a lawyer’s ethical obligation to advance the best argument for his paying client, unimpaired by academic considerations. Thus, he should not have ignored academic considerations and made a more credible scholarly argument. Dershowitz, however, was paid for his role in representing some of his clients who were seeking a grant of clemency from President Trump.

Following her support for overturning Roe v. Wade, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a former professor at Notre Dame Law School, said at an event at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center that her goal was to convince the audience that the court is not “comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.” Justice Barrett was unconvincing because she avoided a legal academic’s responsibility to come to terms with the powerful indictment by Richard Posner, a prominent former appellate judge, that because justices do not share a commitment to a logical premise for making decisions—for example, cost–benefit analysis—they must be ideological because they cannot be anything else. In addition, she ignored the scholarly empirical evidence showing that justices have repeatedly made ideologically based rulings that reflect significant polarity within the court.

Justice Barrett’s defense against toadyism is that she adheres to an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, which again is unconvincing because there is no original constitutional meaning to discover in many cases. Using an originalist approach in other cases would lead to abhorrent results, such as not providing constitutional protection against race-based and sexual discrimination.

Of course, Justice Barrett is now a judge—no longer an academic—and was an originalist as an academic. In other words, she is now parlaying her weak academic arguments to often support President Trump in vital matters before the Court. She has become an academic toady because she has little commitment to distinguishing the legal profession’s excellence.

Academic economists who have previously served on the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) have identified helping to weed out atrocious policies proffered by an administration as one of their most important and most successful responsibilities. Implementing a set of tariffs on goods from countries across the globe is one of those atrocious policies that serious academic economists do not support. Any economist who attempts to do so would find it difficult to draw on sound theoretical and empirical arguments to justify their support.

President Trump, however, has succeeded in attracting academic toadies who are willing to support his global tariff policy despite its weak theoretical and empirical justification. Peter Navarro, a former professor of economics and public policy at the University of California, Irvine, who has served in trade-related positions in both Trump Administrations, has zealously supported President Trump’s tariffs, going as far as saying that tariffs are tax cuts when the consensus among economists is that tariffs are a tax on imported goods, which is largely passed on to consumers in higher prices.

Both Kevin Hassett, a former Columbia Business School professor who is the current director of the National Economic Council, and Stephen Miran, a Harvard University PhD who was nominated to join the Federal Reserve, also support tariffs. Former CEA Chairmen Greg Mankiw and Jason Furman have soundly rebutted Hassett’s and Miran’s intellectual basis for their support.

Engaging with government policymakers is not like engaging with academic colleagues at the frontiers of knowledge. Because policymakers are far from the frontiers, basic economic concepts, such as opportunity cost, cost-benefit analysis, and externalities, can go a long way toward improving public policy if given serious consideration. Other academic disciplines also contribute valuable concepts to guide policy improvements.

Government performance in President Trump’s second term will be harmed by toadyism that ignores academic expertise because it conflicts with the President’s instincts. Academic departments should enlighten their students about this disturbing development, so they make it more difficult for future presidential administrations to find academic toadies.