There is no one who would suspect that the guy who lost on
Dancing with the Stars and also forgot the three cabinet departments (including the one he leads) that he wanted to end while running for President or the woman in charge of the World Wrestling Entertainment would
NOT be in the top 15 for worst cabinet members when this all began on January 21, 2017. It also is clear that every single one of these 15 would be on the top of the list of worst cabinet members in every other modern Presidential term. Most of the Trump cabinet members would have lasted about a month even in the corrupt Nixon Administration or the scandal ridden Reagan Administration. In fact, everyone of the 15 would have quickly been fired in both Republican and Democratic administrations of the past 50 years. The reality is that none of these 15 would have been confirmed in any previous administration and most only cleared the Senate by the skin of their teeth.
We have not seen this level of corruption since the Buchanan Administration, who actually had a number of his cabinet members turn against the United States before the Civil War. As far as we know, only one of the Trump cabinet members has turned against the United States. This is my opinion of the worst 15 cabinet members over the two and a half years of the Trump Administration. To see the volume of the scandals, suspect behavior and blatant criminal activity among this rogue's gallery of far right ideologues will never be matched. You have to wonder if a lot of this could be avoided had we not allowed the simple majority votes to approve judicial and cabinet members in the US Senate or had eliminated the Electoral College in 2001? I base this list on the harm to United States and the government that they are entrusted to lead.
There are cabinet members who were bad, but they have not harmed the public to the extent of the 15 yet. For example, Elaine Chao made the unusual step of defending Boeing and flying on a 737 Max to reiterate its safety just one day before the grounding of all their planes and after nearly every other country had grounded the 737 Max planes. This spotlighted the cozy relationship between Boeing and federal investigators and caused concern for airline safety. Matthew Whitaker was acting Attorney General for a mere 3 months but he could have made the list for his outrageous testimony before Congress. His background was sketchy, and we do not know all the damage this Attorney General did while in office. Rex Tillerson seemed out of his elements, but did not make the list. Here are my Top 15 worst cabinet members in the current administration.
15.
John Kelly for his role as Chief of Staff. He kept his head down at Homeland Security and tried
to deal with the Muslim Ban as well as the regular attacks on immigrants by his boss. He went into the Chief of Staff job with his eyes wide open for the craziness of the Commander-in-Chief, and was almost immediately sidelined. Outside observers felt he would bring military discipline to the Oval Office, but that was quickly proven to be a fantasy. The chaos only accelerated under John Kelly. The contradictory statements escalated and the administration drifted from one crisis to another. The White House acted from a position of chaos and felt more like working in the US Embassy in Saigon in late April 1975 than the center of US government in the bubble of Washington DC. He was the chief of staff for this administration while Puerto Rico was suffering and 3,000 people were dying after Hurricane Maria. He attacked a sitting Congresswoman with lies and exaggerations. Kelly was indifferent to his boss not comforting the wife of a fallen military hero or the racist comments his boss made after Charlottesville hatefest. He did not seem to understand the job or be able to understand how his actions impacted others. He was a fish dressed in a suit put in charge of an aviary for Birds of Prey--they ate him alive, suit and all.
14. Mick Mulvaney makes the list, but I can't decide if it is because of his awful performance as the
head of the Office of Management and Budget or is it his horrible job as acting Chief of Staff. In every other administration, the head of OMB is a full time job, but Mulvaney has held this job while acting as head of the Consumer Protection Bureau and then Chief of Staff. As the head of OMB, he has allowed the deficit to explode while continuing to champion trickle down economics. As OMB Director, the President's budget in 2018 did not ask for the billions for a Southern border wall, but then the administration shut down the government because Congress did not give over billions for the wall. Mulvaney was chief of staff at the midway point of the government shutdown and spouted outrageous claims in public. He has not brought discipline to the White House or set one communication strategy. He continues the "let-Trump-be-Trump" laissez-faire strategy to the role of Chief of Staff. Mulvaney also has ethics investigations for burying government research that counter administration positions and not being a good steward of public money. His tax cut for the rich has also exploded the deficit that young Congressman Mick Mulvaney would be yelling and screaming on every Sunday show about the horrible legacy to be paid by his children.
13. Alex Acosta was a low key appointment to the Department of Labor after the previous nominee
had to withdraw for allegations of domestic violence and misogyny. Acosta makes the list because of his handling of the prosecution of Jeffery Epstein while serving as the US Attorney in Miami. He negotiated a sweetheart deal with a man accused of having sex with a minor in 2007 that was declared illegal and criticized by a judge in 2019. Epstein hung out and partied with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and many are speculating that this is how Acosta came to the attention of Trump. The problem is that as Secretary of Labor part of his responsibility is to combat human trafficking which is difficult if he had struck a deal with a notorious case with a wealthy friend of the President. He has also done nothing to help the labor force in America. He is silent on the closing of GM plants in America and he is silent on the negative impact of tariffs on working people here at home.
12.
Andrew Wheeler at the Environmental Protection Administration may be the one member of the
cabinet who makes the list for doing his job well. He is a long term lobbyist for America's polluters and Wheeler is now the head of the group that is supposed to enforce clean air and clean water laws. I contend that Wheeler was installed to strip away at regulations of big business to allow them to pollute without federal oversight. He is very good at his job. He was the Deputy EPA Chief working behind the scenes until he was propelled to the top job after the previous director left under a cloud. Wheeler is trying to make coal cool again. He wants to push oil drilling anywhere and everywhere. He is working to get pipelines approved and to strip away regulations over power companies. Wheeler is basically working on strip mining 40 years of regulations, and he has an open door to the largest polluters to make suggestions. He has also ignored problems such as the Flint water crisis, climate change, and the contamination at military bases in the US. This would be a scandal in a normal administration, but this is just how the swamp works in the Trump administration.
11. Tom Price. When you look back now, all his ethical impasses were so quaint back when the
Trump Administration was in its infancy. The scandal that was his downfall was racking up $1 million in luxury private plane trips around the country and paying back $52,000. He would fly in to visit his son for lunch in Nashville, and many of his trips were for personal business. In this administration, he was viewed as a failure for not repealing Obamacare, and could not reform Medicaid. Price got his high position in the "Bad Cabinet" list because he was the first of the current administration to make it through Congressional vetting and then resign. These were probably great things for Americans, but they were failures in the eyes of the President. He also had ethical issues with owning stock in the healthcare industry while sitting on powerful committees in Congress that oversee healthcare and on through the transition phase into the Executive branch. Price was excessively political in how he oversaw this huge department of Health and Human Services. He did nothing for immigrants in detention and also had no response to the opioid crisis killing US citizens. It did seem suspect that he resigned over his travel issues when there were at least three other members of the cabinet with the exact same problem. Could it be that lavish travel was not the real reason he left? We will never know since the oversight of the Executive Administration had totally broken down.
10.
Ben Carson, the man who will play Sleepy in the live version of
Snow White after his term, cracks the top 10 cabinet member. Can you believe this guy was a neurosurgeon? He has had his share of high profile scandals that he weathered like the outrageous price of his office furniture and the involvement of his relatives in HUD business, but behind the scenes he has really undermined the mission of the Department of Housing by employing
unqualified staff and defending the horrendous cuts to the housing budget. He was ill-prepared for a Congressional hearing to explain the HUD budget, and he has caused homelessness with some of his policies. Carson could not explain to Congress why he had removed any mention of providing rights to Lesbian and Gay individuals within America's homeless shelters. He has stripped away fair housing protections by dialing back investigations. When his furniture scandal erupted, he was overshadowed by all the other scandals in the administration. Carson has told staff that they have to get approval from upper administration before they can have any contact with those outside groups. While he is strict with his staff, he has allowed his family free reign within the department. Carson's wife was involved in the decorating problems and his son received a contract to help HUD with a "listening project." There was also concern that his oversight staff was going over to the Department of Interior to clear the Secretary of wrongdoing. The place is a mess, and they are failing at their core mission of helping people with housing.
9.
Ryan Zinke is one strange guy formerly of the Department of Interior, and he piled up the scandals
while also working to undermine the mission of the protecting the nation's public lands and the resources. He came in riding a horse in Washington DC with a flag signifying his presence in the building and ended his term blaming "false allegations." He did more to change the course of the agency to the opposite of its founding purpose in two years then any of the other cabinet members. Zinke tried to shrink national monuments which has never been tried before. He allowed the use of lead bullets for hunting, he sought to eliminate the rules preventing the import of trophy carcasses that resulted from big game hunts. Zinke tried to eliminate protections on certain endangered species, eliminate off shore drilling regulations in Florida, and re-interpret the Migratory Bird Act. He dramatically cut the Interior budget especially with regard to enforcement activities. Zinke was also waist deep in scandals including his personal investments in local Montana businesses, his meeting with lobbyists and oil executives and not having those meetings documented in his calendar, and his requests for the government to pay for charter flights to private functions. Luckily, he regularly wore rubber waders with all the dangerous waters he waded into including insulting members of Congress and attempting to shut down the health impacts of mountaintop mining operations. He laid off thousands of employees and transferred others to jobs that they have no expertise in as a form of punishment. He blamed the California wildfires on "eco-terrorists" without any evidence, and regularly violated the Hatch Act by campaigning while doing public business.
8.
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions comes in at number 8 for the worst cabinet member. If there was
any more prescient parents in the history of the Republic it has to be Jeff Sessions' parents. I mean, who else would name their kid after not one but two Confederate leaders in hopes that he would grow up to be one of the most racist Senators, Attorneys General, or US Attorney in American history. He recused himself from the investigation over Russian involvement in US elections thus permanently pissing off his boss, and lied to Congress about meetings with Russians. He was like a man without any friends in Washington. Sessions was a radioactive Attorney General. He still worked to put his stamp on injustice in America by going strong after the Marijuana industry. Session attempted to put toothpaste back in the tube by re-interpreting enforcement of discrimination based on gender identity to not include trans individuals. He defended the Muslim travel ban and attacked a Hawaiian judge while at the same time, attacking the State of Hawaii. He went after immigrants and was the architect of the family detention policy including the caging of children. Sessions defended in court every crazy and outrageous proposal of the Administration and yet his owner kept beating him. Kept coming back for more punishment with that weird smile on his face. Only thing positive one could say about this guy was he was a true believer so he did not get caught up in all the graft or enriching himself like the other cabinet members.
7.
Steven Mnuchin. There is something poetic that the guy who funded a movie about a post-apocalyptic hell-scape without any government called
Mad Max Fury Road would be the Treasury Secretary of an administration that hates government. He is also a weird man with a wannabe actress wife who both crave the spotlight. Mnuchin was one of the authors of the tax cut for the rich in 2017 that has since blown a hole in the US deficit. That horrendous monstrosity of a change in law that provides tax breaks to the rich by forcing our children to pay for the fiscal irresponsibility of this administration alone rockets the authors to the top of bad cabinet list. Mnuchin also had suspect travel arrangements on private planes that he later had to reimburse the government for. He has dubious ethical standards by turning his production company over to his wife, which did not settle any of his many conflict of interest problems. He helped to hide the Trump tax returns and took the unusual step of cancelling sanctions on a Russian oligarch. All of this plus his general disdain for the media and our elected Representatives put him at #7 of the bad cabinet members.
6. William Barr: The case against William Barr is lengthy and as of this writing he has only been
Attorney General for a few months. He became the propaganda arm for the White House in his dealings with the Mueller Report, but he cannot be seen as one of the worst cabinet members. Some would characterize him as one of the best cabinet members for defending the person who appointed him to the office he occupies. I look at the Attorney General from the perspective of a mafia family administration. William Barr is like Consigliere Tom Hagen from the Godfather movies. Barr's current job is to be one of the most competent members of the family providing legal advice and recommendations for expansion of this criminal enterprise. By the way in this example, Jared Kushner is Fredo, Ivanka is Michael Corleone, and Steven Miller is Sonny. Anyway, Barr has not had time to do bring scandal to the office yet, but he has piled on unethical behavior such as lying to the American public about the Mueller report. He will not talk to the House side of Congress and was held in contempt. He has kept information vital to the investigation of the President out of sight, but has not claimed executive privilege for some reason. I am sure that Barr will finish strong with a higher place on the list.
5.
Betsy DeVos. Now we are entering the top 5 in horrible cabinet members. For this spot we have to
give it to the woman who is single handily trying to privatize the US Educational system. Like Zinke, she is another of the true-believers who wants to use her government position to completely subvert her own agency. She has worked to repeal many of the Obama administration rules and procedures. DeVos has refused to consider discrimination of trans individuals as a Civil Rights issue. She struck the tough rules laid down over the previous administration on sexual harassment on college campuses. She has reinstated an accrediting firm that was dismissed by the Obama Education department. DeVos has not allowed people swindled by bankrupt for-profit higher education centers have their loans automatically cancelled. In fact, DeVos has gone out of her way to protect for-profit colleges even those shady groups accused of fraud. She has adopted the Trump stance on dealing with Congress through scorn and disdain. DeVos is the sister to a truly evil Bond character Eric Prince, and some of that heart of darkness had to run in the family. She has also ignored or run out the clock on many education issues facing the United States. She has no suggestions for the huge increase in student loan debt facing the youth of America or children dying in school shootings. DeVos avoided telling Congress any suggestion about the scandals over celebrity college admissions. No list on the DeVos tenure would be complete without mentioning the boneheaded things that she has said as the head of the cabinet office in charge of educating America's youth. From her claims in her confirmation about schools needing guns to defend against Grizzly Bears or claiming that historically black colleges being good examples of choice despite the reality that African Americans typically did not have a choice of schools before 1940 were all part of an amazing number gaffes by the Secretary.
4. Wilbur Ross seems like he is too old to be involved in a scandal. He sleeps through meetings and
acts like a cantankerous old guy yelling about the neighbors whenever he is on TV or appearing before Congress. Department of Commerce is such a critical position with the US Census coming up and so his reach is vast. I believe this guy is dishonest to his core and has had decades to perfect his lying behavior. He lied about putting a question concerning US citizenship on the US Census falsely claiming it was at the request of the Justice Department. He was a lifelong free trader until he joined the nationalist's administration. He lied about divesting from many companies which could present a conflict of interest with his current job. He even shorted a company days before it was revealed that he was invested with the Russian backed company knowing that the scandal would probably reduce the stock price. So, he profited off his own scandals. He was accused of siphoning off money from his business partners and workers to the tune of millions of dollars. He is one of those deplorable guys we have heard so much about.
3.
Kirstjen Nielsen has the outward appearance of being a strong compassionate leader, but it
became apparent she was a cold shell of a human after incarcerating and jailing children away from their parents. Yes, Nielsen constructed American concentration camps for refugees and immigrants to the United States. She ripped children out of their parents arms and then put them in cages. She lied repeatedly to Congress and attempted to use verbal gymnastics to cloud the minds of the American public with the merits of building a wall. No one in their right mind could justify a physical structure along our southern border as a sound policy, but Nielsen did. She had a role in bad responses to hurricanes in the United States including the aftermath of Maria in PR. There is no way to understate her crimes against humanity with the family separation policy. She went along with the racist policies within the White House to portray refugees seeking asylum as criminals. Nielsen accused the media of mischaracterizing the family separation policy. She lied to the American public by insisting that the President could not sign an executive order ending family separation only hours before he did in fact sign that order. Migrant children died in custody during her watch, and yet was regularly berated and betrayed by her bosses in the White House. So she made a deal with the Devil to provide cover for an evil policy, but was still criticized by Lucifer for not doing her job very well.
2.
Scott Pruitt moves into the number 2 position only because of the volume of scandal surrounding
this corrupt individual. His crimes were not as evil as Nielsen in the immediate, but have a long shelf life. His ability to put corporate profits above global climate change will only be felt by our children. He chased windmills for a year to bring back coal jobs, and he worked to enrich himself and his family while doing the people's business. By the end of his term, he was facing 14 separate federal investigations one more bizarre than the next. He was a headache for ethics officers and inspector generals throughout the government. He was nominated to serve as head of the Environmental Protection Agency as the choice of big polluters in America. He voiced skepticism about the impact humans are having on climate change and was hated by current and former EPA staff. He was king of the Swam Monsters in a cabinet straight out of the Black Lagoon. Pruitt attempted to diminish the role of the agency and reverse any progress made in regulating polluters over the previous 16 years. He was not shy about his shilling for corporations over the interests of the public.
The first budget under Pruitt's term as EPA chief was a cut by 24%, and he attempted to eliminate previous lawsuits through settlements. He bullied staff and regularly met with energy industry while rarely talking to environmentalists. Under his leadership, the EPA saw a precipitous fall in collections of penalties for violation of environmental law. Pruitt was paying a ridiculously low price for two rooms in the house of an energy lobbyist. He used flashing lights to stop traffic so that he could go to fancy restaurants. Pruitt had an excessive travel budget including private jets, military flights and first class accommodations. His excuse for this expensive travel was that lashing out from passengers on coach flights could "endanger his life." He kept up this excessive travel after other cabinet member resigned for the same reason. He made a new art out of wasteful spending including $70,000 for two desks and $43,000 for a sound proof phone booth. Pruitt tried to get his wife a Chick-fil-A franchise, and made staff use their own credit cards to pay for his expenses. He had his security detail track down lotion at the Ritz and following his family around at Disneyland. He reassigned or demoted staff who were not following the party line on climate change, coal or those who questioned his leadership. While promoting some, he promoted others or gave them amazing bonuses from other government resources. Pruitt also attempted to promote himself for other more high profile jobs in the administration.
1. The worst cabinet member in the first two and half years of the administration is
Michael Flynn
who only actually served for 24 days in the administration. Flynn gets the title of worst cabinet member because he sold out his own country for...well, I am actually not sure why he sold out his country. He did work for both Russia and Turkey leaving himself open for blackmail. He was attempting to reduce the sanctions against Russia. He had regular contact with Russians between the election and the inauguration, and then lied about those contacts. He delayed a Kurdish invasion of Syria to appease Turkey. Flynn was under investigation for planning a kidnapping and rendition of the cleric Fehullah Gulen back to Turkey for his alleged involvement in a coup. After the lies and working to undermine US interests, the President asked the FBI director to let Flynn go about his life with no further sanction, because "he was a nice guy."
Eventually, Flynn pled guilty to lying to the FBI, but it is not clear why he sold out his country and assisted two foreign powers over the United States. Was it money? Was it an attempt to get back at President Obama who had fired him? Was it pure stupidity? Other issues that put Flynn on the top of the list of bad cabinet members include the repeated chants to lock up a political opponent like he was moving into governing a banana republic. He said that Americans can have a legitimate fear of Muslims and that Islam is a political ideology and a cancer. Flynn was a big supporter of the Muslim ban, and met with far right leaders from Austria during the transition. Overall, he was horrible. He had the shortest tenure and he acted in concert with an enemy of the United States against our interests.
That is my opinion and I understand that with each day scandals continue to mount in this Legion of Doom Cabinet.
by Brian Davis.
