Inexperience matters: The logic of Trump’s controversial nominations

Some of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks are dominating the news in a way that no president’s choices ever have, not even Trump’s own 2016 selections.

The focus has been on what’s troubling in his nominees’ backgrounds — but we should focus even more on what’s not there: management experience.

Take Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Defense. Hegseth has been a talking head on Fox News for a few years. He served with distinction as a military officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay, rising to the level of major before leaving in 2020.

He has also briefly worked as a financial analyst and at two small political action committees.

Hegseth would be the youngest secretary of Defense in history. But, more importantly, it’s likely he’s never had more than a dozen employees working for him in a conventional workplace. The Defense Department has more than 3.4 million uniformed and civilian employees. As secretary, Hegseth would helm one of the largest organizations that has ever existed.

Defense secretaries typically have one of four different profiles: corporate executive, Washington insider/administrator, retired general (or admiral) or politician. Hegseth has no such experience.

The same is true of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee to be director of National Intelligence. Like Hegseth, she has experience as a military officer. But she’s never led a large bureaucracy or even a small one. The DNI job is one of the most bureaucratically complex in the world, as the intel community is broken up into 18 different pieces, including the CIA, the NSA and the DIA. With no background in intelligence and no experience in management, Gabbard faces a vast task in learning on the job.

Over at Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would have at least as challenging a task. Although HHS has fewer employees than Defense or Intelligence, it still has 80,000, and a departmental budget of almost $2 trillion. Kennedy has been in charge of a few nonprofits working for the environment and later against vaccines. Their budgets and number of employees wouldn’t be worth 10 minutes of an HHS secretary’s time.

Which takes us to former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who withdrew his nomination for attorney general on Thursday because of sexual misconduct allegations. But little mention was made of the fact that Gaetz has demonstrated absolutely no ability to handle a department of 115,000 employees charged with enforcing the nation’s laws. His replacement nominee, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, has a much more conventional resume for the job.

Trump has made some appointments that are solid from a management perspective. His chief of staff, Susie Wiles, seems to have a great background for keeping a White House running. His Interior secretary nominee, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, has experience as a corporate leader. And there are others.

But the Kennedy, Gaetz, Gabbard and Hegseth nominations are stunning in the enormous gap between the experience these nominees bring and the task to which they have been assigned.

Management and expertise are no guarantee of success, and their absence does not mean failure is inevitable. The “best and the brightest” got America into Vietnam and Iraq, after all. And someone with no background or experience at leading a large institution can sometimes rise to greatness.

But expecting it to happen four times in the next few months is a big gamble for America. Because what just these appointees would be in charge of — our defense, our health, our laws and our intelligence — is so desperately important that it would be comforting if it were in the hands of people who had led a state government, a federal agency, a large corporation or a union.

Trump didn’t make these appointments by accident or whim. In running his real estate corporation, he occasionally gave big jobs to unqualified people. He’s bragged about how it often works out great, and the subordinates become fiercely loyal to him for taking a chance on them. But this also creates a dependency; that person can’t leave the Trump Organization as easily as someone who had credentials and a reputation before Trump.

These unqualified nominees know that they would not have been selected by any other president. They owe everything to Trump in a way that more qualified nominees would not. Authoritarians around the globe often appoint inexperienced or even clownish figures to high office precisely for this reason.

These selections, based on inexperience, may end up costing the nation quite a lot.

Jeremy D. Mayer is an associate professor of policy and government at George Mason University, and coauthor of “The Changing Political South.”