A Bureaucratic War on 55 Million: The Insanity of “Continuous Vetting”

6 minutes read time.

In a move that is simultaneously one of the most insidious and breathtakingly stupid policy shifts in recent memory, the Felonious Punk administration has declared a quiet, bureaucratic war on every legal visitor, student, and temporary worker in the United States. The administration confirmed this week that it is now “scrutinizing the records of all 55 million U.S. visa holders” in a new program of “continuous vetting,” searching for any potential violation, from a minor overstay to disfavored political speech, that could result in the revocation of their legal status and deportation. It is a logistical undertaking of such unprecedented and impossible scale that the administration has not even bothered to explain how it would work, because the goal is not actually to succeed. The true purpose of this policy is to deliberately sabotage the legal immigration system, creating a climate of fear and grinding the process to a halt through sheer, overwhelming chaos.

The Case Study: Weaponizing a Traffic Accident

The administration’s recent, abrupt ban on issuing new visas for commercial truck drivers serves as the perfect case study for this new strategy of chaos. The trucking industry in the United States has for years faced a critical and well-documented labor shortage, a gap that has been partially filled by a steady stream of legal, foreign-born drivers. These are the workers who keep the nation’s supply chain moving. Yet, in a single post on X, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared an immediate halt to these visas, claiming that foreign drivers were “endangering American lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers.”

What is the specific pretext for this sweeping, nationwide policy change that will have massive repercussions for the supply chain? According to a report in The Washington Post, a single, tragic fatal crash in Florida involving a semitruck driven by an Indian national who was in the country illegally. This is a classic and deeply cynical administration tactic: seizing upon an isolated, anecdotal tragedy to justify a pre-determined, radical policy goal. The expert analysis, however, reveals the true and far more insidious motive. As Edward Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations explained, this is part of a “concerted effort… to discourage American companies… from hiring and retaining foreign workers.” The goal, Alden argues, is not to target truckers specifically, “but to send the message to American employers that they are at risk if they are employing foreign workers.” The truck driver ban is the first shot in a much wider war on American industry’s reliance on legal immigration, a shot fired under the flimsiest of pretexts.

The Orwellian Machine: Vetting Speech, Not Crime

The mechanics of this new “continuous vetting” regime, as detailed in the source materials, are chillingly Orwellian. The process will include a “complete scouring of social media sites,” made possible by new rules requiring that privacy switches on applicants’ phones and other devices be turned off during visa interviews. This is a massive and unprecedented expansion of the surveillance state into the digital lives of millions of people who have not been accused of any crime. The stated purpose is to root out potential terrorists, but the actual criteria being used are far broader and more sinister.

The administration has empowered immigration officers to deny or revoke visas for expressing “anti-American” views—a term with no legal definition, which the official USCIS memo deliberately conflates with support for terrorism. This is not a system designed to catch hardened criminals, who are unlikely to detail their plans on Instagram. As David J. Bier of the Cato Institute argues, the goal is to “proactively conduct reviews of social media posts and revoke visas based not on conduct but speech.” This transforms immigration officers into thought police, tasked with adjudicating the sincerity of an applicant’s patriotism based on their online expression.

This subjective standard is, as Bier predicts, ripe for abuse and will inevitably be applied in a “discriminatory manner targeting immigrants with certain backgrounds and in certain visa categories.” We have already seen this playbook in action with the administration’s revocation of thousands of student visas, some explicitly for participation in pro-Palestinian campus protests. The “anti-Americanism” test is, as other critics have labeled it, a new form of McCarthyism, a powerful weapon to be wielded against any group deemed politically disfavored by the administration.

“Time is Not My Concern”: The Architecture of Incompetence

The sheer logistical absurdity of this plan cannot be overstated. The U.S. government, with its already backlogged and overwhelmed immigration agencies, now claims it will continuously monitor the digital and real-world lives of 55 million people scattered across the globe. The State Department issued close to 11 million temporary visas in the last fiscal year alone. The idea of retroactively and continuously applying a vague, subjective social media scrub to this population, in addition to all new applicants, is a logistical fantasy.

When pressed on the impossibility and the immense amount of time and resources this would require, a senior State Department official was shockingly and revealingly dismissive. “Time is not my concern,” the official told reporters, “the security of Americans is.”

This is a stunning admission. It is an explicit acknowledgment that the administration is willing to paralyze the legal immigration system, delay processing for millions of legitimate applicants, and waste billions in taxpayer-funded resources to pursue this ideological crusade. It is a confession that the bureaucratic chaos that will inevitably result from this policy is not an unfortunate side effect; it is the entire point. This is the “stupid” part of the user’s thesis, made manifest: a policy of intentional, colossal, and malicious incompetence.

Attrition Through Administration

This, ultimately, is the Felonious Punk administration’s endgame for immigration. Unable to pass their most extreme measures through Congress, they are instead choosing to break the system from within. The “continuous vetting” of 55 million people is a policy designed to fail, but in its failure, it succeeds at achieving the administration’s true goal. It makes the process of legally coming to or remaining in the United States so slow, so punitive, so arbitrary, and so terrifying to navigate that people will simply give up. It is a policy of attrition through administration, a deliberate campaign of bureaucratic sabotage designed to achieve their anti-immigration goals by making the legal system simply unworkable. It is insidious, it is stupid, and it is a shameful new reality for a nation that once prided itself on being a beacon for the world.