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But after a while I caught on. I mean, I saw what they were hiring. I also swiped my dance card once after an audition, and on a scale of ten, they gave me for dance, ten, for looks, three. Well!

Val – “Dance: Ten, Looks: Three” from “A Chorus Line”

With the latest news flash that Dan Bongino has been appointed Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by the supremely talented paragon of law enforcement prowess that is Director Kash Patel, the appointment seems to be in line with the general theme amongst the appointees to senior positions in the executive.

At least Bongino has some actual law enforcement experience in the NYPD and later in the Secret Service which is more than we can say about his enemies list toting boss but that’s where the competence to actually help lead a law enforcement agency that is supposed to be independent of White House control ends.

When the new Deputy Director’s mission statement is “my entire life right now is about owning the libs”, this does not fill one with confidence that he can be impartial and committed to the rule of law and investigations with respect for due process and without fear or favour.

The Senate doesn’t get to weigh in on this appointment as part of the advice and consent clause of the Constitution but they voted to confirm Patel as Director of the FBI in spite of his very hostile and dismissive attitude throughout the joke that was the “confirmation hearings” where there were any number of actionable statements if not outright perjury that should have ensured his nomination didn’t make it out of committee, much less to the floor for a final vote.

Where are the Senators and more importantly why in the hell aren’t they acting as the fail-safe to keep the more dangerous and deranged appointments from being confirmed?

Let’s take a quick peek at their body of work so far, eh?

• Department of Defence (Secretary Pete Hegseth) – Senator Tillis didn’t exactly cover himself with distinction on this nominee whose previously reported behaviour at pretty much every stop he was employed would have had him charged under several articles of the UCMJ as well as an affidavit wasn’t enough for Tillis to actually keep his word and stop this nomination from being confirmed. Tillis himself has tried to spin his flip-flop multiple times to try to find something that will stick including the latest being the FBI supposedly uncovering “credible threats”. The FBI might well have done so but the timing seems to conveniently ignore Occam’s Razor which was the previous reporting that he’d been subjected to full-court pressure by the White House which likely included a promise to primary him in two years time (which worked to turn Senator Joni Ernst back to toe the mark and vote to confirm Hegseth as well).
• Department of Commerce (Secretary Howard Lutnick) – A career Wall Street guy who should know just how damaging to the economy and the spending power for average Americans the Trump tariffs will be was confirmed largely on the promise that he would support those very damaging policies.
• Department of Energy (Secretary Chris Wright) – His career has largely been in the energy sector including a large fracking company. Experience is good. The denial of climate change due to human activities which has been proven pretty conclusively over decades…not so good. It’ll be interesting how he’ll adjust to running a department whose chief mission is actually overseeing our nuclear weapons programmes especially with DOGE doing their level best to chuck out the people who actually know how the nuclear weapons work!
• Department of Health and Human Services (Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr) – Conspiracy theorist par excellence with an unhealthy obsession with anti-vaccine campaigns is in charge of the nation’s health care. Hegseth and Patel really sucked as nominees but arguably RFK Jr is orders of magnitude worse…it’ll be interesting to see which one of those three ends up with the most blood on their hands directly attributable to poor decisions taken on their watch.
• Department of Homeland Security (Secretary Kristi Noem) – If shooting things is a pre-requisite for the job of leading Homeland Security, former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem is certainly qualified as her dog Cricket and a goat can certainly attest to having been executed by Noem in a gravel pit. Perhaps Cricket was the worst dog on the planet and the goat was smelly but the evident glee with which she describes this in her memoir is more than a little terrifying should that callous attitude toward life permeate her department.
• Department of Housing and Urban Development (Secretary Scott Turner) – A former NFL footy player who also played for the University of Illinois will certainly give you positive points if you’re an Illini fan. I’m not sure what qualifies him to run HUD but his CV to date doesn’t seem terribly objectionable or extensive.
• Department of Interior (Secretary Doug Bergum) – Apparently, being a Dakota governor is the gateway to the Cabinet with North Dakota’s Governor Bergum getting the nod. His CV reads like a nerd moved into venture capitalism and then the Governor’s mansion. It’ll be interesting seeing how he squares Interior’s putative mission and his previous efforts to make North Dakota carbon-neutral by 2030 with his new marching orders to “drill, baby, drill!”
• Department of Justice (Attorney General Pam Bondi) – The new Attorney General certainly has experience as a prosecutor and AG of America’s appendage which will certainly have given her enough practice at the job. But given that she’s indicated she’s completely all in on “ending the weaponization of DOJ” whilst engaging on a search-and-destroy mission against anyone who worked on the January 6th cases truly introduces great doubts that she’s at all interested in eliminating the so-called weaponization of the department against conservatives even though the successful prosecutions in Biden’s DOJ were againsts Democrats! She’s also a star of Trump’s defence team during the first impeachment and a regular election denier and conspiracy theorist that she has never offered one shred of proof to corroborate her claims…even when asked by Fox News correspondents. She does have one thing going for her…at least she isn’t Matt Gaetz!
• Department of State (Secretary Marco Rubio) – Surprisingly one of the least controversial choices being confirmed nearly unanimously and certainly experienced in foreign relations. If you’re not a fan of China’s influence in the world, Rubio is your guy. Sadly, his “neutering China’s influence” remit got much tougher with the destruction of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) which provided billions of dollars of food and medicines with a big American flag on the packaging as a great way of promoting the generosity of the American public…a mission he was an enthusiastic supporter of during his time in the Senate.
• Department of Transportation (Secretary Sean Duffy) – Talk about a lousy first day on the job. Right after confirmation, his first task is leading the response to the Blackhawk helicopter colliding with an American Eagle commuter jet on final approach to DCA’s runway 33. Ouch! At least he handled it much better and more compassionately than his boss did.
• Department of the Treasury (Secretary Scott Bessent) – Another Wall Street guy who thinks Trump’s tariffs are terrific. And…they’re not! But an even more daft idea of his is to create and confirm a shadow Fed Chairman before current Chairman Powell’s term ends. What a great way to confuse the hell out of the Wall Street markets…rather like having two popes alive at once. Yeah, that didn’t exactly work so great, either. Meekly going along with President Musk’s DOGE bros completes the hat trick for sheer idiocy.
• Department of Veterans Affairs (Secretary Doug Collins) – I don’t know about you but it seems to me that someone who doesn’t understand what the Affordable Care Act was trying to accomplish had it not been hamstrung by Congress and constant assaults from conservatives and then doubles down on that ignorance by asserting that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) wouldn’t result in people in losing health coverage (newsflash…it did and in a big way!) is really the best person to lead an organisation whose mission is to manage healthcare for veterans, something it’s already done generally poorly and expensively.
• Director of National Intelligence (Director Tulsi Gabbard) – Tulsi is a recent convert to being a Republican but in the spook world of professional spycraft, this isn’t something that’s going to make the human intelligence assets used by various intelligence agencies feel particularly comfortable working with or even trusting our spies and operatives. Parroting Russian propaganda and talking points is even more unsettling for those people whose lives may depend on her decision making. She comes to the position having served in the military but bereft of experience in intelligence operations which is a very different set of skills. Hopefully she turns out to be a quick learner but it’s not looking particularly promising.
• Director of Central Intelligence Agency (Director John Ratcliffe) -Unlike his boss, Ratcliffe at least has some intelligence experienced having served in her job during the first Trump administration. He got generally favourable reviews for being one of the first to talk about the growing intelligence and cyber-terrorism threat from China but since being confirmed as CIA Director, he’d get an “F” for sending the names of employees CIA had hired in the previous two years in an unclassified and likely insecure EMAIL to the White House, some of whom are likely agents conducting counter-intelligence ops who may now be of little use if not in mortal danger should the bad guys get that list. Breathtakingly stupid doesn’t begin to describe that move…and that it was a *DIRECTOR of the CIA* that did it is even more unimaginable for anyone who has an inkling of how Langley tends to work in practise.
• Environmental Protection Agency (Administrator Lee Zeldin) – In 2014, Zeldin expressed doubts as to the severity of effects of climate change. During his confirmation hearings, he admits climate change is real and needs to be addressed. One can dare to dream his change of mind is sincere but serving in an administration loaded with climate change deniers seems to be a bit of a mixed message on the environmental front. But at least he’s not actively tried to destroy the environment so far as I can tell unlike other administrators of the EPA I can think of (I’m looking at *YOU*, Scott Pruitt!).
• Small Business Administration (Administrator Kelly Loeffler) – Her CV suggests she’s got decent experience in business and even owned a minority stake in the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA before selling her share due to controversial views on Black Lives Matter and her habit of going to the coach to analyse games at half-time which would seem to be the coach’s job during the actual game, not hers. But it’s the insider dealing during the COVID-19 pandemic that does raise some questions about her judgment even though she was ultimately cleared.

Looking at that group of confirmed the high-level appointments (at least at this time of writing)…if that’s the Senate’s idea of “advise and consent”, it looks a heck of a lot more like “abdicate and cower” and the quality of vetting you’d expect from a disgruntled teenage intern!

The quality of the appointees in terms of experience is shockingly low and it’s clear the overarching “feature” is absolute loyalty to President Trump. Not the Constitution they swear an oath to protect and defend and most certainly not to the American people whom they are supposed to serve and support!

The Senate (and if we’re really honest, it’s really all on the Republicans who have the majority and could do something if they weren’t so frightened of their own shadows and Elon Musk’s money primarying them!) seems to be content to give the Toddler in Chief (take your pick, there’s two of them in the Oval Office right now) whatever he says he wants rather like the child in the grocery store checkout queue demanding a candy bar or toy that was strategically placed there by the marketing people.

Only time will tell how many Americans will pay the price for putting dangerously incompetent people in charge of these departments.

But if these people they’re rubber stamping really do such a poor job as it seems they likely will, the third of the Senate up for re-election might well look at the bloodbath that was the 2018 midterms as the “good old days” when not even Elon Musk’s or Donald Trump’s money can save their asses.