Michael Blitz: Warm bodies don’t add up to expertise

Most of the harm done by an incompetent cabinet doesn’t show up on cable news. It shows up slowly — in weakened institutions, degraded norms and decisions whose consequences only become visible much later.

After a year of this administration, fatigue and noise have made it easier to stop paying close attention to who is actually running the federal government. That’s understandable. The damage rarely arrives with sirens. But it does accumulate, quietly and bureaucratically, in ways that are difficult to reverse once they are finally recognized.

Every cabinet position, every agency head, every senior appointment comes with an assumption baked in: that the person selected has some meaningful relationship to the work itself. Not perfection. Not brilliance. Competence — earned familiarity with the terrain. Anything less isn’t leadership; it’s negligence.

In a functional government, leadership roles are filled by people who have spent years grappling with the problems they are tasked to manage — often imperfectly, sometimes frustratingly, but with a working knowledge of consequences. Increasingly, that assumption appears optional.

Consider Pete Hegseth, elevated to oversee military matters after a career defined more by media performance than institutional leadership. Public visibility isn’t the same thing as operational command, and confidence on camera doesn’t translate to managing the readiness and morale of millions of service members. Or take Kash Patel, whose record suggests a talent for political combat rather than institutional stewardship, now entrusted with matters of national security and justice that demand discretion, restraint and credibility.

Then there are those whose careers have been shaped by opposition to the very missions they are now meant to steward. Lee Zeldin, long skeptical of environmental regulation, is tasked with protecting it, which requires not merely administrative oversight, but belief in the legitimacy of the mission itself. Russ Vought has spent years arguing that much of the federal government shouldn’t exist, and now occupies a position that allows him to weaken institutions from the inside. This isn’t reform; it is inversion, with dismantling as a form of leadership and hostility as a governing philosophy. Hypocrisy may be common in politics, but it becomes more troubling when it appears to be a qualification rather than a liability.

Other appointments raise different alarms. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brings notoriety rather than scientific grounding to public health, an arena where misinformation has already proven deadly. Linda McMahon arrives with business credentials that bear little connection to education policy. Pam Bondi has repeatedly blurred the line between law enforcement and political loyalty, raising questions about whether the law is being served or selectively shielded.

The same pattern is visible even in Vice President J.D. Vance, whose rise has been fueled less by governing experience than by ideological performance. His background as a venture capitalist and culture-war commentator offered little preparation for executive leadership at the national level, where persuasion, coalition-building and institutional knowledge should matter more than rhetorical combat.

To be clear, the problem here is not ideology. Conservatives can govern. Liberals can govern. Outsiders can sometimes govern very well. The problem is indifference to competence itself — the idea that anyone can do anything as long as they are loyal to the person at the top.

That’s not how complex systems work. We understand this instinctively in ordinary life: Experience matters, familiarity matters, and the work itself sets limits on who can reasonably do it. Government is no exception.

What makes President Trump’s pattern of appointments especially dangerous is that many of these offices exist precisely to restrain power — to enforce laws, protect public health, manage national security and safeguard the environment. When those roles are filled by people hostile to their purpose, the damage does not announce itself all at once. It accumulates quietly, and often irreversibly.

If these appointees were merely adequate, it would be far better than what we are seeing. Adequacy would mean respect for expertise, patience with complexity and an understanding that governing is not performance art.

Warm bodies don’t add up to expertise. These positions are not symbolic, and they are not rewards. They are work — technical, demanding work that carries real consequences. Most of us would never accept lower standards in our own lives, whether at a hospital, a school or a job site. There is no legitimate reason to accept them here.

Michael Blitz is professor emeritus of interdisciplinary studies at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice.