Second, for a senator who is skeptical of “the deep state,” Hawley seems to put great trust in the career bureaucrats at the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense. He apparently believes they have the knowledge and authority to decide for everyone which goods and inputs are essential and which ones are not.

We’ve seen how this essential–nonessential distinction plays out with services throughout the pandemic. When drafting stay-at-home orders, state-level government bureaucrats got to decide which workers were essential and which were not. It just so happened, too, that some interest groups had these bureaucrats’ ears more than others did. Take teachers’ unions, which were effectively able to convince the government that teachers should not be forced to go to work, even as a whole host of other businesses had been. As Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote in June, “many parents who struggled to simultaneously work and proctor Zoom school from home concluded that teachers are in fact more essential than the pizza-delivery guy.” Such mistakes are inevitable when you let the government decide what’s essential.

Nevertheless, Hawley wants to extend that arbitrary and special-interest-influenced process from services to goods and from state governments to the federal government. Though some goods are more essential than others, every good is essential to someone. Under Hawley’s plan, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense would have to draw a line somewhere along that gradient of essentialness — and every trade group, lobbying firm, and member of Congress in America would be making the case why their preferred companies should be on one side of that line. Marco Rubio, for example, has argued that domestic sugar production needs subsidies because foreign sugar is a threat to national security — advocacy that, in all likelihood, has something to do with his close relationship with major sugar producers in his home state of Florida.