Yves here. This short Dean Baker post says even more than he intends. Why has there not been more uproar about the jokes masquerading as administrators that Trump has installed in the Cabinet and other top posts? Because, as we and others (particularly Aurelien) basic managerial “put one foot in front of the other” skills have been catastrophic decline over the last two decades. I am stunned to now look somewhat charitably upon the likes of Hank Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and Ben Bernanke in the runup to and after the financial crisis. Even though they flailed about and sought only to address proximate problems so as to preserve a rotting status quo, they did so with some appreciation of what they were up against and so eventually were able to stumble their way through to an end-state that worked for them. We have nothing like even that limited level of skill operating anywhere at senior levels.
And why has that become acceptable? The only thing I can fathom is fear in the ranks of the press and the business community. I recall having readers say during Brexit that the business community held back from expressing their considerable, fact-based reservations about the way Brexit was evolving into the hardest form possible out of fear of retaliation by the Government. The press has also become cowardly. The Conversation has a new article, ABC’s and CBS’s settlements with Trump are a dangerous step toward the commander in chief becoming the editor-in-chief, which details how both networks capitulated to Trump suits when the odds of them prevailing in court was very high. The piece also points out how past Presidents tried to muscle the media and got less far. A lesson here is that the press is more than ever run like a business and not with a sense of editorial mission, which would result in relishing fights with power where the publisher has a winning case. The press that published the Pentagon Papers is long dead. And that is a big driver in the rise and continued failing upward of abject mediocrities like Keir Starmer and Kamala Harris. The Trump team does represent a ratchet down, but it’s on an established trajectory.
And as readers will also appreciate, “People will die” is a feature, not a bug, per Lambert’s second rule of neoliberalism.
By Dean Baker, the co-founder and the senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). He is the author of several books, including “Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better bargain for Working People,” “The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive,” “The United States Since 1980,” “Social Security: The Phony Crisis” (with Mark Weisbrot), and “The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer.” Originally published at Beat the Press; cross posted from Common Dreams
We all know and expect that a president’s top appointees are picked in large part because of their willingness to carry out a president’s agenda. But usually these are people with some experience in the areas that they are overseeing. Insofar as this is not the case, they can generally rely on the high-level career officials in the departments or agencies under their control to make sure that necessary tasks get accomplished.
Unfortunately, this is not the case now. The main and possibly only qualification for Trump’s top appointees is the ability to tell blatant lies with a straight face. He has picked people who not only have no background in the areas they oversee, they don’t even have the most basic understanding of their responsibilities. And in many cases they have fired or marginalized the career people with expertise.
Starting at the top, Trump picked a former Fox talk show host with a drinking problem, Pete Hegseth, to be his Secretary of Defense. Secretary Hegseth apparently didn’t know that he shouldn’t be making war plans on unsecured channels and without knowing who was included in the conversations. He apparently also didn’t know that his wife should not be included in the discussions.
Hundreds of people just died in Texas because of this failure, and we are virtually certain to see far worse in the future.
Trump has a Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, who claims he doesn’t know that tariffs (import taxes) are taxes. Since tariffs are among the oldest form of taxes, long predating the income tax, this is a pretty elementary point that a Treasury Secretary would be expected to know.
Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary, didn’t know what habeas corpus is. Since that is basic right guaranteed by the Constitution, it would be rather important for the person controlling the largest federal police force to be familiar with the concept.
While knowledge of their areas may not be a strong point for top Trump officials, lying in front of TV cameras is an area of real expertise. We see this constantly.
We just saw Attorney General Pam Bondi tell us that there is no Jeffrey Epstein client list. This was after telling us back in February that the list was sitting on her desk and promising that it was soon to be released.
After Trump released his “Liberation Day” tariffs, which included a steep tariff on the uninhabited Heard and McDonald Islands, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insisted this was not a mistake and an indication of a rushed job. Instead, he said the tariffs were necessary to prevent transshipment from other countries to escape the taxes Trump was imposing.
This is obviously an absurd claim since there were many uninhabited islands that escaped taxation. In addition, while the problem of transshipment to avoid tariffs is real, it is not one that can be solved by putting a tariff on imports from islands inhabited by penguins and seals.
China and other countries whose exports are subject to high tariffs can and will ship them through countries that face much lower import taxes. If our customs agents can’t recognize that we are not actually importing cars and television sets from uninhabited islands, they surely will not be able to detect that the goods coming from Thailand or Indonesia were actually manufactured in China.
Trump appointees do have a remarkable ability to lie. RFK Jr. can tell us that discouraging people from getting the measles vaccines has nothing to do with the largest measles outbreak in decades. They all tell us that we can reduce Medicaid spending by $800 billion over the decade (roughly 10 percent), without throwing anyone off the program. And former DOGE boss Elon Musk told us 20 million dead people were getting Social Security benefits.
But it seems that none of them can do their jobs, and since they have fired or sidelined most of the high- level civil servants with expertise, these jobs are not getting done. Hundreds of people just died in Texas because of this failure, and we are virtually certain to see far worse in the future. As much as Trump might insist otherwise, incompetence is not a virtue.
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Trump’s top appointees weren’t selected for their ability to tell blatant lies with a straight face. They were selected for their personal loyalty to Trump and not nebulous things like the Constitution or even the country. First time around he had people like Mike Pompeo, William Barr, Betsy DeVos, Gina Haspel and Nikki Haley on his team. My own guess is that he thought that they were all ‘tough guys’ and he had a big thing for tough guys then. But being tough did not carry automatically over into competence and certainly not loyalty as Trump found to his cost. So this time around he is going for personal loyalists – to him. If you spent time defending Trump during his wilderness years from 2021 to 2025, then that gave you a big in for a top appointment. It was all about loyalty and for people to stick by whatever he said as Tulsi Gabbard found to her cost when she committed the high crime of disagreeing. You see this with him and golfing buddy Lindsay Graham who is ‘always there for him’ and so takes his advice. Trump is the great decider who is going with his instincts rather than advice by his Cabinet members who will not disagree with him. This being the case, he could have cardboard cut-outs for his Cabinet – so long as they were loyal to him and enacted whatever agenda he decides on.
In line with your thinking re: lying and loyalty, I think there are many similarities between what T is doing and what Gary Saul Morson describes L3nin as doing.
For example, on truth and lying:
And the party relationship to truth:
There seems to me to be many points of similarity. If I’m not mistaken, T’s playbook is L3nin Light.
He didn’t hire Col McGregor, who was loyal…
I admire Dean Baker’s work and your statement about loyalty does not really refute Baker’s statement about telling blatant lies with a straight face, it’s just another ingredient.
Introducing Charles Kushner—From ABC News: “Kushner is a real estate developer who made his fortune building thousands of residential units across New Jersey. In 2005, Kushner was sentenced to 24 months in prison after pleading guilty to multiple felonies, including making false statements to the Federal Election Commission, assisting in the filing of a false tax return, and retaliating against a cooperation witness.”
“During his plea hearing, he admitted to retaliating against his sister for cooperating with law enforcement by having a prostitute seduce her husband and covertly film them having sex.”
“He was subsequently pardoned by Trump at the end of Trump’s first term.” Charles Kushner’s son Jared is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka.
Despite having no diplomatic or government experience, and unable to speak French, Trump appointed Charles Kushner Ambassador to France. I mean Mick Jagger speaks French. Trump couldn’t, at least, find someone who speaks French?
Trump proclaiming himself touched by – The Deity – in saving his life and thus choosen[tm] too make America Great Again, during a public video, today on The White House broadcast ….
1:08
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoYnn444ECo
Wellie he did in his first term get real chummy with the evang faith healer wealth set, with upgrades since.
I’m calling Aristocrats with a rim shot …
Here flood risks have often been expressed as “20 year flood” or “100 year flood” – a highly misleading description, as people can, and do experience such floods in successive years, as in the Severn valley in recent times, but this doesn’t help residents or insurance companies assess risk at all.
Much of the data here is historic too – in most of the northern UK, annual rainfall is 10% higher than 1990, but with 5% more rain days, which confirms that periodicity is changing too.
There is now a new measure which tries to show how rainfall intensity is changing. This newish criterion compares rainfall events with monthly averages, so say a 50mm overnight rain storm in an area with 90mm monthly average shows a concentration of rainfall that may well cause localised flash flooding. Here in Scotland we are now seeing 150mm rainfall events in winter months, such is increased intensity.
Changing rainfall seasons, even in areas now with lower annual precipitation due to climate change, can predict longer periods of saturated ground and increased vulnerability to flooding, but the rate of change in rainfall patterns is unpredictable in terms of modelling, so unless regulatory agencies are properly funded, then the risks to the public are massively increased.
Tories between 2010-2024 cut Environment Agency budgets by c.60%, just at the same time as weather patterns were changing.
Boiling frog syndrome especially applies to the political class, they are so short termist, they defer on risk assessments, and cut amelioration and adaptation as its an easy target. This institutional failure is inbuilt within neoliberal mindsets.
Add the nihilistic attitudes of free market, small state dogmatism and you have all the preconditions for regular failure in environmental management, let alone disaster management.
As you sow so shall you reap.
Trump appointees do have a remarkable ability to lie.
They sure do. But surely this post is simply confirmation of the earlier post “What Does the US’ Increasing Emulation of Israel Augur for the Country’s Future?”
Israeli spokespersons and politicians literally lie about everything. No surprise then, that spokespersons and politicians in the west are increasingly doing exactly the same.
I would consider a “remarkable” ability to lie to include the likelihood of being believed. These guys sure do lie a lot, but I don’t think anyone believes. But maybe what is remarkable is the quantity and not the quality.
Having lived in the U S of A during the years after the passage of the Patriot Act, until 2021 (Biden administration), I’m leery, after what I have seen, of proposing that Trump is especially incompetent.
First, internally, almost all U.S. companies are rigid, hierarchical, inflexible, and slow to change. I have worked in publishing for years — a sector that is supposedly loosey-goosey — and I’ve seen plenty of top-down management in action. And if you don’t like it, you can head to Human Resources, which will be happy to curtail your health insurance (which is a workforce-disciplinary measure, not a benefit).
Second, what is happening, particularly since Obama, is a change in capitalism. If possible, globalized capitalism is more and more predatory. Cruel managers and deliberately uninterested boards of directors are rewarded handsomely.
All of which is to say, Kristi Noem served as a U.S. rep for four terms and supposedly has a degree in political science. She knows what habeas corpus is.
Scott Bessent worked for Soros for years. He knows what a tariff is.
Pam Bondi knows what the law requires.
I am reminded of the attempts in the past to portray Hillary Clinton as the Most Qualified Candidate Ever, and I saw the more recent attempts to pretend that Biden was cogent and the Kamala Harris was up to the job. And one must not forget Pete Buttigieg, future of the Democratic Party, secretary of transportation known for his successes with the railroads, Amtrak, Boeing, and residents of East Palestine.
The issue isn’t competence so much as their training as U.S. business types. They believe that management is always correct. By and large, they believe that White Is Right. And they believe in “controlling labor costs” by mistreating their employees and destroying the unions.
Many of them are also practitioners of something I saw with plenty of lawyers: It isn’t a conflict of interest until you get caught.
This is an “ethic.” Incompetence? I”m not sure. Predatory capitalism reinventing itself? Look at the explosion of subsidies for war profiteering in the US of A and Europe.
Incompetence is easily found, just by marking words spoken in public or in a press interview. For one example of many to cite from the Biden administration…I paraphrase former DHS Secretary Mayorkas circa mid year 2023. Beneath I’ll add my short hit list or best of since Bush 41. American leadership in full display as imperial decline hastens the pace, my two cents.
Quoting Mayorkas, in an ABC interview…”Our southern border is secure.”. The lie may indeed had a kernel of truth but since that time it’s obvious a blatant lie. Back to the article, sorta meh since it is by Dean Baker. People indeed also died in hurricane Helene, and damage in NC was catastrophic; but that under team Blue. Memories are just so very short including my own…
Bush 43,. Mission Accomplished.
Clinton. It depends on what the word means, Or I had no sex with that individual.
Powell. Iraq has the WMD. Trust the US intelligence for certainty.
Yes, but what if the U.S. business ethic is founded upon the Peter Principle? Sycophancy. The banality of empire.
“…globalized capitalism is more and more predatory.”
Agreed. You don’t have to be competent to run a business anymore, you just need to be ruthless enough to exploit others – your employees, your suppliers, your customers, etc…
Unfortunately American’s have this habit of confusing wealth and power with intelligence and competence.
Baker has been around a long time (an NC first?) and his gig used to be scolding the competent but also villainous who gave us the 2008 crisis and then bailout. So I would agree with you that it was those competent but villainous people like Hillary who have given us the incompetent but still villainous Donald. Trump the opportunist is merely living his egotist dream. As presidential material you can’t really say that Obama, Axelrod’s runway foaming marketing concept, was any more authentic even if he did go to Harvard. Hillary was a small town lawyer married to a small state governor. Amateurism has been in the air for quite a while now. Trump is its ultimate expression.
But boy is he ultimate. How long can this go on?
Obama was a CIA creature designed and built to take the job, his father was on the company payroll before he was born. Similarly, the Clintons were both funneled into politics from their post high school years just like dubya Bush. This is not to say mediocrity isn’t rampant, just that the oligarchs will only tolerate competent tools if they are smart enough to ‘get the game’.
Oligarchs have been putting in incompetent, but loyal or at least biddable, politicians for decades because it gave them more power and wealth; they forgot or didn’t care that power is not the same as control, certainly not ability, and now that they have hollowed out the system for its wealth, they have no one to save them from the oncoming chaos and collapse.
I agree with this. The big problem to my mind is this mindset that if we just “get the adults back in the room” then everything will be fine. (Please ignore what happened when we tried this with Biden.) Of course Trump just beat them at their own game – campaigning on helping working class people and then shoveling money at the oligarchs. We have deep systemic problems, and the most amplified voices are only talking about Trump as if he is some sort of aberration. Please.
What really galls me is you already have the Dems talk of if they win the primary opening impeachment investigations. (I guess third time is the charm?) And yet, I remember the Dems taking the congress in 2006, campaigning on having “subpoena power” over the Bush II administration. They proceeded to “look forward” and the few subpoenas they did issue were roundly ignored by the Bush II officials without consequence. I usually chalk this up to Bush II having the last name “Bush,” while Trump is that damn interloper who ended the Bush and Clinton dynasties. “He’s just not one of us, dammit!” Thus, the Dems will go after Trump, where they would not if Trump’s last name was ‘Bush”.
Agreed. Trump is nothing but a more boorish example of the typical elite we’ve had for at least the last 30 years or so. He’s hated by the other elites for being a funhouse mirror version of themselves.
2006 is when the Democrat party lost me for good. Bush II setting the world on fire was so bad, I voted for Kerry in 2004 – first and only time I’ve ever voted for a Democrat for state or national office. I had some hope that Pelosi might hold Bush to account in 2006, but it quickly became clear she never had any intention of doing so. Shrub swapping candy with Michelle Obama years later was just an additional kick in the face.
A pox on all their houses – not just the Donald’s gilded tower.
I think it can be explained simply as causal indifference. These people simply don’t care about the consequences of their actions in regards to their charges. They’re too busy gratifying themselves to care.
Even before Trump, cabinet posts were a reward for support. If the cabinet should only include people with practical experience, then this rule should be clearly established instead of left to the president’s discretion.
I think the point here is, there used to be no problem at all filling out 2/3 or more of a Cabinet with appointees both supporters AND competent, and backstopping them where necessary with very experienced Undersecretaries.
the rise and continued failing upward of abject mediocrities
what a perfect line. thank you, yves.
and from Dean, this ringer:
“This is obviously an absurd claim since there were many uninhabited islands that escaped taxation. In addition, while the problem of transshipment to avoid tariffs is real, it is not one that can be solved by putting a tariff on imports from islands inhabited by penguins and seals.”
i scared the ducks with me belly laugh.
I’m not sure if it is genuine incompetence though. For example, I get the impression that the whole tariff policy and continuous flip flopping on it is designed for insider billionaires to front-run the announcements and make more billions. They is even a video of a bunch of them in the Oval Office bragging how many billions they have made on the market moves. It may look chaotic to most people and to the world, but it delivers great results for them.
Regarding the forever wars, it certainly has delivered for the defense industry. Not only the weapons sold in the past few years, but also locking Europe into increased defense spending which will massively benefit American arms manufacturers. And how about Europe buying American LNG for 10x the price of Russian pipeline gas? Plus the added benefit that Europe de-industrialises and some of that relocates to the USA.
Also, given Trump’s plans for Gaza, it makes perfect sense to have a real estate guy as Middle East envoy. I’m just waiting for Trump to launch a Gaza crypto coin at this point.
Long term damage may be terrible, but all that counts are short term profits. And nobody will ever be held to account, so there is no downside to them. So while it may look like incompetence to a casual observer, from the perspective of sociopath billionaires it is perfectly competent behaviour.
Yes, that’s all quite clear. Trump says “it’s easy to win a trade war”; a thousand economists and pundits respond with “that’s stupid, nobody wins a trade war.” The more obvious explanation goes unremarked in the press.
Are the people who insist this is “incompetence” themselves incompetent, or is it something else? They also never seem to be held to account.
From Yevs intro,
>A lesson here is that the press is more than ever run like a business and not with a sense of editorial mission, which would result in relishing fights with power where the publisher has a winning case. The press that published the Pentagon Papers is long dead.
Indeed, it’s a worldwide problem, here is corporate ownership of media today:
Wikipedia first:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_conglomerate#:~:text=Examples by country,-Further information: Media&text=In the 2024 Forbes Global,Global completing the top four.
From 2016 so it’s dated, but has it gotten any better?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-companies/
From Politico:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/18/is-wall-street-to-blame-for-the-collapse-of-newspapers-00141920
From 6 years ago:
https://vizworld.com/2019/12/who-owns-the-news-united-states-infographic/
A fair amount of the time now reporters are just stenographers.
Back in the time of the Pentagon Papers, journalists were rewarded for having a nose for news. Today’s journalists are rewarded for having a nose for self-censorship.
Just about 50 years ago Ford botched a question during a Presidential debate with Carter, claiming:
That was probably enough to sink Ford’s hopes that year, incompetence was unthinkable at the highest levels at the time, na gonna happen.
It’s almost as if incompetence is rewarded now~
That was a real head-scratcher. The Polish scientists, husband and wife, in the adjacent lab had a complete fit over that one. They returned for another year in the early-1980s and schooled me on how Ronald Reagan got it exactly right regarding the Soviet Union in Central Europe.
A wonderfully snarky bit just to remind the lettered set that they really are the bestest and brightest.
Why ask and answer the obvious- these appointees are handsome, bold at the microphone and do what they’re told. Except Dan Bongiorno- he knows when he’s been had.
Measuring these folks against prior administrations is like comparing Pavarotti to Milly Vanilli. One is exceptionally talented, the other merely mimes.
Of course in both cases they present music to the audience that is lulled into somnolence, except , of course, the nattering class. They just natter.
“Measuring these folks against prior administrations is like comparing Pavarotti to Milly Vanilli. One is exceptionally talented, the other merely mimes.”
Since at least Bush II, it’s felt more like one party gives us Rob while the other party gives us Fab. Pavarotti went into finance after seeing the direction things were going. (Now that is stretching a simile!)
“Measuring these folks against prior administrations is like comparing Pavarotti to Milly Vanilli. One is exceptionally talented, the other merely mimes.”
I think a better analogy is with a pyromaniac who sets a house on fire just to see it burn, and faulty wiring (not caught by inspectors) in a house that causes it to burn. No difference in the end result – the house is toast.
The puppet masters use corruption or incompetence as it suits them. Presidents are just puppets.
The incompetence of our political leaders is more than equaled by the incompetence of our political media.
Off topic, but an example is the current reporting and comments over Jeffrey Epstein. The media seems obsessed over the potential fallout within MAGA. It seems very slow to report the well documented facts of this ongoing scandal and coverup that has been ongoing for over twenty years. JFK, RFK, MLK, 911, the Iraq war, Russia gate, Covid and more, the media consistently fails. Journalists and their publishers get Pulitzers for lies.
The “potential fallout within MAGA” is very real. I know three people who voted for Trump in the last 3 elections who have told me never again [obviously not for Trump, but anyone he “anoints” or runs on a similar platform.] One is so angry he hoped enough of his previous supporters stay out of the mid-terms that the Democrats retake the House and Senate and impeach him. Spitting mad, so to speak. Their reasons are all variations of “I voted for no war with the Ukraine, release Epstein’s files, and / or stopping war with Iran and in Palestine and I feel lied to…so never again.”
i overhear the same, in the cig and beer store, the produce aisle and the feed store.
I’m out as an anarcho-socialist, hereabouts…which confuses the mundanes…so they aint jawing about politics with me anymores,lol…but they are talking, and not quietly, among themselves…and in public places.
maga aint happy with maga #1.
the epstein thing and ukraine, especially.
i hear little about gaza/”israel” from those folks…but i will note that my boys, and their girlfriends(future daughterinlaws, looks like), are all against israel…seeing it for what it is.
Press co-dependency on pols and their handlers has only increased. Heightened awareness of access, rewards, punishments and monetization of eyeballs and ears have combined to reduce objectivity and call into question whether current press stenographers can even understand the First Amendment.
There has been a surreality bubble over DC for so long that they don’t recognize how pathetic they seem in their cavalier ways. Too bad for the mere provincials.
I think the difference between a Hank Paulson and a Scott Bessent is the evolution of looting from being a perk of office to its sole purpose. Across the board, in government, media, education, health, law, the elite class is grabbing with both hands while there is something left to steal. As one fund manager commented on X this last week, his acquaintances have all decided that they need to make as much as they can now so they can survive whatever comes next.
As John Michael Greer has said, collapses of nations or civilizations don’t happen in a straight line and it’s not likely we go from our current form to a landscape of roving warlords in one step, but the general trajectory is becoming apparent to more and more people.
Of all the uninhabited islands, why did the Heard and McDonald Islands pop up on anyone’s (or thing’s) radar as a place where business would be done?
It’s enough to make one wonder if some shell company or other nefarious business has found use for the location. Things like the supply chain finance frauds cross my mind. So, this lazy gaffe from a cut and paste job could have another story or be one of the world’s worst inside jokes.
It’s just as likely that someone in the Commerce office mentioned they heard that McDonald’s is using Thousand Islands on their burgers and somehow it got transposed into the tariff language. Slovenly, undeed!
With the fraud that is so much a part of global economic systems, leaving no country unaffected, it’s more likely a stumble upon that and then just ignoring it.
Trump likes to eat McDonald burgers (Donald Trump)…
the level of sycophancy is reaching the levels of royal courts of old:
painting teeth in black
speacking with a lisp
White a la Isabelle
etc.
My guess is that it was included in the list because it has been assigned a county code top-level internet domain (.hm) and no one bothered to check.
Ha, a company I’m familiar with that is mid-sized with thousands of employees globally, has been trying to migrate to a new build system for at least 7 years now; three internal failures at building out this tool, from a complete lack of understanding of what a migration would entail and what people do day to day. The final attempt is a forced adoption of an OTS solution that’s completely incompatible with the existing markup language.
All to achieve an end result involving metadata that no major competitor company I know of does. They all use a much simpler approach that works. Indeed, the current system, I hear, does work reasonably well, but the original author is long gone and there’s no appetite to seriously improve it, when over 7 years of failures to replace it, it could have been improved.
An alternate system that customers and stakeholders loved, that a specific product used, was ultimately disbanded. It grew up as an alternative to the original system that no one wanted to/could improve.
There’s never been any accountability in this that I’ve heard of, just an ongoing march to disaster.
This is my only indirect experience with this kind of managerial cluelessness.
Such incompetence levels surely merit a Peace Nobel Price some day soon.
Excellent article and commentary!
It’s been called the richest Cabinet in history (even excluding Elon):
Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet Represents the Top 0.0001%
https://www.citizen.org/article/trumps-billionaire-cabinet-represents-the-top-0001-percent/
I’ll have to say that Americans have wanted a CEO President, and I think they got one. Much of what I see reported really reminds me of my time in large mega corporate world – just how shockingly out of touch and sometimes just completely dumb actions taken by upper management.
Provocative post and interesting replies.
Presidents, in my memory as far back as Eisenhower, Kennedy, even Nixon, picked people not because they were going to carry out an ideological agenda but because they were thought to be either super competent and accomplished or politically important. Fact is, they often didn’t know the persons very well. Sherman Adams, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, William Rogers weren’t ideological clones of their presidents any more than Earl Warren turned out to be the conservative Chief Justice that Ike thought he had appointed. They weren’t known entities and they sometimes did the bidding and sometimes didn’t turn out to be what their presidents wanted them to be.
The hyper politicization that was modest under Nixon started to become virulent with the advent of Chaney and later flames were fanned by Gingrich in the House. Over time, greater press scrutiny of the appointments made it more necessary for all manner of vetting, including ideology.
But I agree that the obliteration of “traditional” competence as a requirement is striking in this administration. Nevertheless, this is Trump2, and is not a question of competence in the traditional form (what might have been brought to the party by the people Yves Smith mentions — Paulson, Geithner etc.). They actually *are* competent at what they’re there to do: a) align ideologically with the president’s transactional agenda and b) destroy the bureaucracy (in their view, the “deep state.”)
One other observation: the power of the press that published the Pentagon Papers was great not because they weren’t corporate (newspapers then were overwhelmingly owned by rich families). Their power was great because they reached masses of people of all persuasions and had a level of influence that is simply unknown to journalists today. Yes, digital media tends toward concentration in media ownership but the distribution is not similarly concentrated. Just the opposite and therefore the power of media, however much journalists and commentators like yourself may raise reasonable and even powerful exception, is far more limited than it was.