It will have to be done, to whatever extent is possible. Too many agencies have been put in the hands of people either incompetent for the role or directly opposed to the purpose of the agency (or both).
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Yet again, the same old punchline:
The Aristocrats Trump administration!
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Well, two ways. But try the peaceful way first.
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do they have expertise in some part of the agency they are appointed to?
do they have any executive experience running an organization approximately the size of the one they are being asked to run?
How do you define expertise?
- Sonny Perdue was the founder and partner in an agricultural trading company before taking over as SecAg.
- Scott Pruitt had “expertise” suing the EPA and certainly managed a large organization below him.
- Hmm…Ben Carson…lives in a house?
It’s a relatively low level position that does not require senate confirmation.
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What @navarro said. If they were people appointed by Trump that’s pretty much enough, but for due diligence you could check whether they had any prior relevant experience / capability relative to the roles they were appointed to and whether they supported the aims and objectives of the agency or organisation they were appointed to.
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i would regard perdue’s background as qualifying as experience regardless of his political leaning. pruitt’s background, on the other hand, would best be described as anti-experience.
seriously, read the book–https://bookshop.org/books/the-fifth-risk-undoing-democracy/9780393357455
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You are correct that all NOAA positions no longer require Senate confirmations as of 2012. It still seems to be an external political appointment rather than a conventional hiring process.
I remember when Mexico extradited El Chapo to the US, thinking, “Ah ha, they have found the next Director of the DEA.”
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was it perhaps @jerwin you meant to reply to?
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Argh. You are of course correct.
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No such thing as manbearpig!
We can grow bananas in Georgia and mangoes in Indiana. And the malaria in New York City is not a problem because everyone stays indoors to avoid the toxic plume of the flooded dumps of New Jersey.
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If only it was as easy as sitting them all down on the other side of a table and telling them all one by one “You’re fired!” “You’re fired!” “You’re fired!” …
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Oh what delicious irony that would be. Something like that should be aired publicly on say, a TV show…
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I’ve been cutting my own hair (during the pandemic), and thanks to a set of clipper gates, and some very informative youtube videos, I have to say that it looks almost like when a barber does it.
Not quite pro quality, but definitely not “elementary schooler from the 70’s” like this guy’s styling.
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From the description of “The Fifth Risk”:
The government manages a vast array of critical services that keep us safe and underpin our lives from ensuring the safety of our food and drugs and predicting extreme weather events to tracking and locating black market uranium before the terrorists do. The Fifth Risk masterfully and vividly unspools the consequences if the people given control over our government have no idea how it works.
This actually describes just about everyone Trump has appointed to a high level position. In this case your daily weather report will now be vetted to make sure my President look good. Think of David Legates as a human Sharpie™.
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for a short book it packs a serious punch. when i said above that it was “the most frightening book i read in 2017 . . .” i was engaged in hyperbolic understatement. it may have been the most frightening book i’ve ever read.
it also made me feel sorry for chris christie, an emotional response i would never have imagined feeling prior to reading it.
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Obama was more the exception than the rule in keeping a lot of Bush appointees on. Part of the transition for any incoming President of a different party (obviously Reagan->Bush was different) is getting replacements lined up. The incoming Trump Administration was a radical exception in that they had no real planning or much interest in transition and so were unprepared when 2017 came around.
It’s a safe bet that even before November the Biden campaign already has put out feelers to the experienced hands from the Obama Administration to see if they would be willing to come back to start the stable digging that will be necessary.
BTW, one thing we probably won’t have to worry about was a trick that the Shrub Administration pulled, where quite a few of their political appointees went Civil Service instead of resigning. Obama caught a lot of flak for keeping Shrubbies on, but some of that was unavoidable thanks to the Civil Service holdovers in position to generate drag.
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It’ll take YEARS to undo the damage. It’s not just appointments that have to be replaced but regulations which go through a federal commenting process that need undoing as well. Effectively, this is something that’ll be around for decades. This doesn’t include the wingnut judicial appointments which will be around for half a century.
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