The Trump administration madhouse is in charge, and you won't believe how bad it really is.
Here's the amazing story of a few Trump administration appointees, unqualified in every way, bumbling their way to a disaster just off the horizon (click "pop-out" icon in upper right corner):
The Moneyball author is writing a series of articles for Vanity Fair about President Trump's picks to lead federal agencies — and the consequences of those appointments. Michael Lewis' articles about how the Trump administration is changing the federal government on the ground level are published in Vanity Fair.
LEWIS: There's a theme in the sort of risks that the Trump administration are taking by putting people who are not suited for jobs into the jobs. And one of the themes is that they're - a willingness to tax the distant future for the political present because the distant future really doesn't have a voice at the table.
...Because this happened in every place. In the energy department, I mean, just to quote one of the civil servants, they said they ran around insulting people. And one of the things that has occurred to me as I've been wandering around the government is that there's, like, a distinction that needs to be made within the world of Trump appointees, and that there are a whole bunch of people - like Sam Clovis in the science department at Agriculture or like Rick Perry at Department of Energy - who have exhibited such ignorance of the task that they are - been handed to do that the responsible response to being asked to do it should've been, you know, I'm not qualified.
Rick Perry said onstage - call for the elimination of the Department of Energy, and I couldn't remember its name. So the feedback - what I got out of career civil servants is, one, it was an insult that he was even put in the job in the first place. Two, he wasn't making any great effort to actually get to know the place, though he was doing lots of public appearances.
So he - and seemed to view the job as largely a ceremonial job, where he would tour and tweet about it, tour a national laboratory, for example, that's - and tweet about it. Or he was making - he's been - there's been lots of foreign travel and tweeting about it but no, like, organic interaction with this department he's meant to run. Now, that may have changed since I wrote my piece. I don't know. But the fact that the people in the building who are serious, committed civil servants are offended by the person who's been put on top of them is - it's not a good sign.
Department of Agriculture: Nine months after they’d arrived a man I’d been told was the best informed of all the department’s career employees about the haphazard transition couldn’t tell me how many of these people were still roaming the halls. And what fingerprints they left were characteristically bizarre. They sent certified letters to several senior career civil servants, for instance, telling them they were being reassigned—from jobs they were good at to jobs they knew little about. “Too close to the Obama administration is what people are saying,” noted one U.S.D.A. career staffer. They instructed the staff to stop using the phrase “climate change.” They removed the inspection reports on businesses that abused animals—roadside circuses, puppy mills, research labs—from the department’s Web site. When reporters from National Geographic contacted the U.S.D.A. to ask what was going on with animal-abuse issues, “they told us all of this information was public, except now you had to FOIA it,” said Rachael Bale. “We asked for the files, and they sent us 1,700 completely blacked-out pages.”
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