When the New York Times profiled Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez earlier this year, it presented her as the kind of Democrat who might be able to solve the party’s failure to connect with the working class. Gluesenkamp Perez owned an auto repair shop before being elected to Congress and is a harsh critic of the party’s elitism. She also won in a Republican-leaning district in Washington state and was reelected this year even as Democrats lost ground in many places. She has been called the future of the party. 

A persistent theme of Gluesenkamp Perez’s rhetoric is that government bureaucrats are out of touch with ordinary Americans, and she laments “rulemaking done by people in suits […] not by people in Carhartts.” She repeatedly uses the kind of rhetoric about excessive regulation that one might typically associate with the right, arguing that Democrats need to be more serious about cutting the “red tape” that makes ordinary people’s lives more difficult. 

Gluesenkamp Perez recently introduced a bill that she says will target a key example of this kind of excessive government intrusion. She calls it the “Banana Act,” though its official name is the Cutting Red Tape on Child Care Providers Act. She wrote it, she says, because a constituent of hers who worked in a daycare told her that under state law, daycare employees weren’t legally allowed to serve bananas to children. Gluesenkamp Perez thought this was a perfect (and ridiculous) example of regulation gone mad. She claims that when she looked into it, state regulators misled her repeatedly about the law. But, she says, her own research revealed that the prohibition was real. As she explained in a video about the legislation: 

I was talking to a constituent who works in a daycare, and they told me they are not legally allowed to peel bananas or oranges for the kids. She said peeling fruit is considered food prep. But they can open a bag of chips. This seemed like a problem to me. So I started looking into it. For months, licensing officials and regulators told me, “No, no, she just doesn't understand the rules.” “She must have misinterpreted the law.” “Her manager is lying to her.” But I kept pushing and eventually confirmed that, yeah, she was right. They would have needed to install like six more sinks before they could legally serve fresh fruit.

A rule prohibiting peeling bananas in a daycare does indeed sound silly. “You know regulations have gotten too convoluted and out of hand,” she says, when “small childcare providers can’t even peel a banana for them out of fear the state will shut down their facility.” And to those inclined to agree with narratives about red tape gone mad, it sounds like the kind of thing that might be true. But is it? I contacted Washington’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families. They were emphatic with me that there is no such rule. Their spokesperson, Nancy Gutierrez, said: 

We  do not have a rule that says you cannot peel fruit for children. If providers are touching foods that a child would put directly in their mouth, there are rules around glove use. [emphasis theirs]

But that’s precisely what Gluesenkamp Perez says they told her, too. She says that “for months,” regulators told her that the no peeling bananas in a daycare rule wasn’t real but that she eventually discovered it was. So the Department might just have been misleading me like they misled her—although I would note that it already doesn’t seem very likely that childcare providers need to “fear the state will shut down their facility” if they peel a banana, given that the regulatory agency that oversees childcare facilities says they would never do this, and there are seemingly no documented cases of it ever happening. 

But if Gluesenkamp Perez found the regulation, I figured her office could provide it to me. So I asked them: What is she referring to? What provision said that a childcare provider “would have needed to install like six more sinks before they could legally serve fresh fruit”? Gluesenkamp Perez’s office said that “the part of Washington state code that spurred this” was WAC 110-300-0198, part of the Foundational Quality Standards For Early Learning Programs. Gluesenkamp Perez’s spokesperson pointed me to the following provision: 

(4) Center early learning programs licensed after the date this chapter becomes effective must have:

        (a) A handwashing sink separate from dishwashing facilities;

        (b) A food preparation sink located in the food preparation area; and

        (c) A method to clean and sanitize dishes, pans, kitchen utensils, and equipment in the food preparation area using:

                (i) A two-compartment sink and an automatic dishwasher that sanitizes with heat or chemicals; or

                (ii) A three-compartment sink method (sink one is used to wash, sink two is used to rinse, sink three contains a sanitizer, and the dishes are allowed to air dry).

Now, this provision does not appear to say what Gluesenkamp Perez is claiming the law says. It provides that child daycare centers must have two separate sinks, one for handwashing and one for dishwashing, and a method for cleaning dishes and utensils, either a dishwasher or a three-compartment sink. There is nothing here about bags of chips being legal to serve but the peeling of fruit being prohibited. I asked Gluesenkamp Perez’s office to clarify how this provision prohibits serving bananas in a daycare (but allows for junk food). They did not answer. Instead they sent the following statement: 

“Access to safe, affordable, available childcare is one of the most important issues facing families in Southwest Washington and in communities across the country. The Congresswoman heard directly from local childcare providers in her district about the real experiences they faced when trying to provide healthy snacks to kids, as well as the impacts of confusing, burdensome regulations on small businesses. Her bipartisan banana bill would ensure that these small businesses have clarity on the rules and are supported and not overregulated out of existence.”

But where is the regulation that gives rise to the bill? The first sentence of the response is irrelevant (yes, access to childcare is important). The second sentence repeats the point that the Congresswoman was told by a constituent that the regulations were burdensome. The third sentence suggests that daycares might be “overregulated out of existence.” But where is the actual regulation? Gluesenkamp Perez made a very specific charge in her video: She said that regulators misled her and insisted it was perfectly legal to serve bananas in a daycare but that she looked into it and found out that serving fresh fruit required “like six more sinks.” Her office did not provide me with any evidence to support her claim that this regulation is real, let alone that anyone had ever actually been pushed out of business for violating it. (I followed up repeatedly and asked them to comment on the DCYF’s denial that the regulation exists but could get nothing else out of them beyond the above.) 

In fact, the spokesperson for the Department of Children, Youth, and Families not only told me that serving fresh fruit is legal, but that it’s encouraged: “Fruits and vegetables [are] high on the list of items to be served,” they said. “Processed foods, such as chips, fall much lower on the food pyramid. We also offer programs to help providers ensure understanding and monitoring of the importance of eating healthy foods.” In fact, the very regulations that Gluesenkamp Perez says prohibit serving fruit actually require it. In the section on menus, state regulations say that “an early learning provider must serve a fruit or vegetable during at least one snack per day.” 

I can’t find any evidence that Gluesenkamp Perez is right that in Washington state, “regulations make it easier for childcare providers to open a pre-packaged, often ultra-processed snack than to peel a banana or cut up an apple.” Her Banana Act appears to be based on a situation that does not happen, and she seems to have unfairly maligned her own state government. The only thing Gluesenkamp Perez’s office could point me to that even faintly resembled what she describes was a rule in effect in Austin, Texas, which required that childcare providers serve prepackaged foods unless they had a food permit.* But she had made a specific claim that regulators in her own state were essentially gaslighting her constituents, and it doesn’t appear that she can justify that claim. I am not claiming that all daycare providers across America are free of regulatory burdens that inhibit serving nutritious meals. There may well be some badly-written regulations. But to claim that, you have to present evidence of it.  

You may well ask: Does it matter whether or not bananas can be served in a Washington daycare? Gluesenkamp Perez’s actual law seems harmless, since all it does is prohibit any regulations that would interfere with the serving of fresh fruit. But the problem here is that narratives about Bureaucracy Gone Mad have an effect. They make people think that government is incompetent and out of touch. But this narrative is often unfair. Often, the staff of state agencies are good, thoughtful people doing their best to enact and enforce regulations that do make sense. Sometimes they make bad calls, or you might weigh the trade-offs differently than they do. But—relevant to daycares—foodborne illness is a major risk for children, who are more vulnerable to infections than adults. So there are reasons that regulators are trying to make sure daycares are hygienic and people aren’t washing their hands after changing a diaper in the same sink they’re washing out cups in. 

Oftentimes, stories about “crazy” regulations are made up by those who want to undermine the functions of government. For instance, Boris Johnson made his name in part by exaggerating stories about the supposedly loopy regulations promulgated by the E.U. One of those was even about bananas. He said the E.U. was dictating what shape bananas had to be. This wasn’t entirely wrong, in that there was a quality control standard requiring bananas put on sale not to be malformed, but there are good reasons why you should want the quality of your produce guaranteed. Instead of explaining those reasons, and then giving thoughtful arguments on why a different policy is needed, anti-regulation demagogues use whatever hyperbole they can to try to convince you that the government is crazy. (See Gluesenkamp Perez’s “like six sinks,” when the regulation in question requires two sinks. Gutierrez told me that while “these rules around sinks are [a] bit more stringent than family home rules [...] DCYF works with providers on different ways to use sinks for multiple tasks, if sinks are cleaned and sanitized between uses.”) 

This matters because there is currently a major debate about what direction the Democratic Party should take, and Gluesenkamp Perez is touted by some as the correct model. But her politics are pro-business centrism with a working-class rhetorical affect. She makes a lot of showy tributes to Real America. She has a chainsaw in her office. She “hired her legislative director, in part, because the woman drove a Toyota Camry with 200,000 miles on it.” She confronted Kamala Harris over the White House’s use of plastic Christmas garlands, implying to the vice president that it was an affront to western pine tree farmers. (Gluesenkamp Perez says that Harris appeared to roll her eyes, which she took as further evidence of the Democratic Party’s elitist disdain for good workin’ folks.) 

But Gluesenkamp Perez’s politics are not progressive, and she is trying to rebuild the centrist Blue Dog Coalition. “There was sort of this idea that I was this undercover AOC,” she said, but she has “very different conclusions” from Ocasio-Cortez. Indeed, Gluesenkamp Perez is a staunch supporter of Israel who has received tens of thousands of dollars from AIPAC and voted to censure Rashida Tlaib. She has blamed the fentanyl crisis on lax immigration enforcement, despite the fact that undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers are typically not the people bringing fentanyl into the country. (“I was talking to a woman who runs one of the largest labor and delivery wards. She said 40 percent of the babies there have at least one parent addicted to fentanyl. What is empathetic—to tell them that’s their problem, or to take border security seriously?”) She was also “one of the first to signal she’d vote to protect Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson in a motion to vacate.” Gluesenkamp Perez insists this makes her a maverick. “I think that the binary of politics on a lateral spectrum from left to right is absolutely bullshit. Like politics is three dimensional, it’s maybe a nautilus even. […] If you challenge the binary, they will fuck you.” 

It’s common to see centrists insist that their politics, nautilus-shaped or otherwise, are in fact bold and courageous. But Gluesenkamp Perez stands out for justifying standard business-friendly Democratic politics in the language of populism. For instance, she took a controversial stance opposing mandatory new safety features on table saws, which were meant to stop people from accidentally lopping off their fingers. (NPR reported in 2017 that more than ten people lose fingers to table saws in America every day—so thousands annually—but 99 percent of these could be prevented if safety technology was implemented universally.) She said that the safety features would drastically increase the cost of table saws and used it as an example of how “policymakers are not only disrespectful to people who work with their hands, but also ignorant of the reality of their day-to-day lives” and vowed to “protect consumer choice” (i.e., the choice to lop off your finger by accident). Gluesenkamp Perez suggested that consumers would have to pay higher costs for table saws that come with the safety feature, but many of these consumers would be companies (most available models of table saw are not for home use), meaning that business owners are the ones who would save the money while workers are the ones who carry the increased risk of amputation. Gluesenkamp Perez therefore used the Big Government Just Doesn’t Understand narrative to justify allowing unnecessarily dangerous products on the marketplace. (She even used the Big Government Versus Working People narrative to explain why she was delinquent on her business’s property taxes. “The tax system is deeply, deeply broken for small businesses,” she said, in explaining why she was late to pay a $6,000 tax.) 

I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of centrist Democrats adopting a superficial pro-worker appearance in the wake of Kamala Harris’s election defeat. They’ll start swearing more (Gluesenkamp Perez reportedly swears prolifically). They’ll wear suspiciously clean Carhartt overalls for photo ops. They’ll buy Christmas tree farms and auto body shops so they can go “Well, as a small business owner myself…” while carefully fudging the distinction between the owner and the workers (just as the New York Times does). They’ll start showing performative suspicion of higher education. (Gluesenkamp Perez demanded that FTC director Lina Khan tell her how many people without college degrees work at the FTC, as if it would be good to have more trade commissioners who have never taken an economics class. Gluesenkamp Perez guessed the answer was 0, though it is in fact 8 percent.) We’ll get more Democrats like John Fetterman, a Harvard graduate who dresses like a slob and has a disdain for the progressive left. A few might even copy Donald Trump and pull a fake shift at a McDonald’s. Republicans understand how to pair pro-ruling class policies with everyman aesthetics, and Democrats will run the same playbook.

It might work, too. It just happens to be morally bankrupt. Ultimately, we don’t want Democrats who follow Republicans in saying that the job of government is primarily to get out of the way. We need to reclaim the New Deal vision of a government that serves as the vehicle for accomplishing our big collective aspirations, that can tackle the major problems of our time from climate to poverty. Of course, I’m all in favor of a leftist critique of bureaucracy. There is nothing progressive about defending inefficiency, excessive paperwork, or cruel means testing. We should make going to agencies like the DMV a pleasant experience (it can be done!). A government isn’t fulfilling its function of serving the people if the people are constantly frustrated by its interventions into their lives. 

But there is nothing populist about vilifying public servants or endorsing the picture of government painted by billionaire plutocrats like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who think regulatory agencies are just useless bloat that can be axed. Often, that picture is based on hyperbolic stories that misrepresent what regulators actually do, which is often more reasonable than it appears in Big Bad Bureaucrat tales. Remember, Gluesenkamp Perez uses her banana story as definitive proof of the more general point that “regulations have gotten too convoluted and out of hand,” meaning that incidents like these are used to buttress a broad view that there is something deeply dysfunctional in the way the state is operating. It is important, then, that the evidence for this view be closely checked. 

There is no excuse for Democrats to falsely accuse regulators of trying to shut down daycares for serving bananas. This is the stuff that drums up Tea Party type anti-government sentiment, when the truth about our present moment is that billionaires are trying to convince us that tearing down social services (and making the billionaires richer) is good for us. Don’t fall for it.

* This was an effort to prevent foodborne illness, though some providers reported that it caused them to serve less nutritious foods. Still, some providers simply applied for food permits, and Austin emphasizes that “pre-sliced apples, celery or carrot sticks” were allowed even without a permit.