The Wrecking Cabinet: Team of Breakers

 

--Ignorantia est betitudo

The Boston Globe today ran an editorial: "Unconventional Trump Cabinet Picks Represent a Clear and Present Danger."

Government Employee

Pointing to Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, Russell Vought for Office of Management and Budget, Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Health and Human Services, the Globe outlined the harm they could do. Vought could prevent aid for Ukraine; RFK JR could gum up vaccine use and approval and Gabbard may be a Manchurian candidate--with known and unknown ties to Putin and who knows who.

Of course, these appointments are all making Trump's most important point: You don't have to know squat to run a big organization. The guys at the top have the easy jobs; all they have to do is to give the general order: "We will sail West," and leave all the details to the executive officer and crew.

This comports well with the sense well entrenched among the common man that the guys at the top, who are making 4000 times what their factory workers make, actually have the easiest jobs. They really don't even have to show up for work.

Some years ago, I found myself at a cocktail party, in some sumptuous setting, speaking with a lawyer for a famous Washington, DC law firm, who looked right out of central casting, white collar and cuffs with a cobalt blue shirt, Armani suit, Farragamo silk tie, star quality hair, and he spoke of his alma mater, Harvard (then Yale Law) and he  mentioned that Larry Summers had recently been deposed/fired as the President at Harvard for being so politically incorrect as to suggest women did not have the head for math and science. 

"It's too bad," he said, "Because Larry had that particular blend of  skill sets which would have made him a really great Harvard President and there aren't that many individuals who have what it takes."

And I could not contain myself, "You've got to be kidding!" I expostulated, "All a President of Harvard has to do is sit back and receive the billionaires who want to donate some millions to Harvard, and to make a commencement address every Spring. It's got to be one of the easiest jobs in the world."

Maybe I just don't know much about the job of college president.

During his first term Trump appointed Wilbur Ross to head the Department of Commerce, and Ross did not attend any of the programs the civil servants had prepared for him to inform him of how the department works, its responsibilities; nor did he read the thick notebooks they prepared. Once on the job, he was shocked to learn the Department of Commerce is really the Department of Data and Information or maybe the Department of Science and Technololgy. Had he gone to the briefings prepared for him, he would have learned he had sway over the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to mention just a few. Ross complained he thought he was taking over the Department of Business--he wasn't interested in all that other stuff.

Perhaps Trump's epitome of appointments was Rick Perry, former governor of Texas who during the primaries said he would eliminate three entire departments to make the federal government smaller: Commerce, Education and then he blanked on the third one. Later he added in Department of Energy. 

So Trump appointed him head of that. 

To his great surprise, it turns out the Department of Energy does stuff like cleaning up sites and sometimes whole towns  contaminated by radioactive accidents, radioactive waste from nuclear plants, and it runs labs like Brookhaven and Oak Ridge. 

It also has to maintain the nuclear silos containing all those missiles. When an Air Force plane accidentally drops a nuclear bomb flying over, say, North Carolina, guess who gets the call? 

Fracking came not from the private sector but came from DOE research. 

Hanford, Washington, a small impoverished town was chosen to make plutonium for atom bombs in the 1940's, and today 10% of the budget of the DOE goes to cleaning up the soil and water table which is washing plutonium toward the Columbia River. If the federal government ever stopped its efforts, Hanford would glow green. Trump won the county Hanford resides in by 25 points. 

To his credit, Perry eventually marveled at all the stuff the DOE does and said Golly Gee, if he'd only known, he would have fought to enhance it, rather than destroy it.

Maybe some of this will happen with Trump's new appointees.

Maybe not.

And it's worth noting that the woman Trump appointed to be the Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, tried to intervene in the star chamber organizations at colleges which heard evidence of date rape without the accused boy ever being able to confront his accuser or, in some cases, even having access to the testimony against him. Accusation became tantamount to conviction, and young men who had worked hard to gain admission, were expelled from their colleges. 

Sometimes having someone who is not willing to bend to a politically correct wave is a good thing.

But, overall, the plan is to paralyze government.

If you don't know about all the good, necessary and vital things government does to keep the nation alive and well, then maybe destroying it sounds like a terrific idea.

We'll see how that works.