Cabinet Makers III

As I noted it the earlier installments on this topic, the nominations that President-Elect Donald Trump is making for his second administration have been coming out at a fast and furious rate, and have been flailing a bit as a result. But as I noted in the last piece, only a few especially egregious nominees are going to flame out. The odds are good that pretty much all the president’s men (cough) will be confirmed.

The worry, of course, is that these malevolent dipshits will turn the considerable power of the federal agencies they’ll lead to wreak incredible havoc and chaos on the nation. The prospect of a MAGA cult member like Kash Patel using the Federal Bureau of Investigation to punish Trump’s political enemies should terrify us all, as should the idea that RFK Jr. is going to inflict his idiotic conspiracy theories on us at the cost of our children’s health and well-being.

But, as Senator Andy Kim (D-Suck It Menendez) noted on MSNBC last night: “You have a number of nominees who are literally, their mission is to dismantle the organization that they are being nominated to be in charge of. I find that to be so dangerous at this moment.”

It’s an important reminder that the danger with some of Trump’s nominees isn’t that they’ll abuse their power and turn their agencies to evil ends, it’s that they’ll run their agencies into the ground, quite deliberately, in order to bring them to an evil end.

This has long been an approach used by Republicans who’ve sought to undo the achievements of the New Deal and Great Society. Through trial and error, they learned that government programs and federal agencies are easy to vilify but almost impossible to kill. (Most famously, Ronald Reagan learned this when he tried to privatize Social Security and suffered an enormous blowback. As an aide to Tip O’Neill joked, the New Deal program was the “third rail” of politics, and if you touched it, you’d die.)

Reagan realized that a head-on assault on such popular policies and programs would indeed be suicidal, so he struck upon a different plan. Instead of trying to kill them, he realized that simply placing leaders who were openly hostile to the fundamental work of an agency would essentially have the same effect.

In order to thwart the environmental movement, for instance, Reagan deliberately appointed officials to key posts who would roll back its previous gains and prevent it from winning any more. Secretary of the Interior James Watt was famously in favor of letting private interests develop public lands, while EPA Director Anne Buford Gorsuch — mother to the Supreme Court justice — worked to roll back regulations on business interests.

Likewise, to slow down federal action in the realm of civil rights, Reagan appointed Clarence Thomas to serve as the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). An ardent opponent of affirmative action, Thomas worked to move the EEOC into reverse.

Last but not least, because conservatives had howled throughout the 1970s that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had throttled economic growth with its excessive concerns for safe job sites and workers’ health, Reagan made sure to appoint Florida businessman Thorne Auchter — whose construction firm had repeatedly been fined by OSHA for its violations of federal laws — as its new head. Not surprisingly, Auchter drastically reduced the number of fines issued by OSHA, closed a third of its field offices and reduced the number of site inspections by 20%.

None of these drastic reversals of policy required any change in the laws; only a change in leadership mattered. The results were basically the same, as the power of the federal government — whether it be protecting the environment, guaranteeing the civil rights of racial minorities, or securing safe worksites — was effectively neutered.

The costs for the country were quite severe, but in these instances, there was occasional blowback on the officials themselves.

Two decades after Thorne Auchter gutted OSHA, there was a fatal accident at a Missouri coal plant when the planned demolition of two silos went wrong. Ignoring OSHA rules requiring a full engineering survey, the company tried to speed up the preparation for the implosion and wound up crushing a 22-year-old worker under a 70-ton chunk of concrete.

The worker’s name was Kevin Auchter, Thorne’s son.