Consequences of Deferred Maintenance
No matter where one starts the clock—Jimmy Carter’s Airline Deregulation and Motor Carrier Acts, the repeal of Glass-Steagall; the Telecommunications Act of 1996; or maybe the recruitment and allocation of so-called “beachhead teams” to staff the federal bureaucracy as of Trump’s inauguration, each team member an insouciant Bartleby, abetting the Koch brothers and other right wing stakeholders—what the deregulatory and deconstructive impulse share is a distinctly temporal quality, instilling the slow seep of future degradation even as immediate consequences are typically nonexistent.