Trump's worst cabinet member?

02 April

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi looks on during her first press conference at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 12, 2025. REUTERS/Craig Hudson

Granted, it’s too early in the life of the Trump regime to be able to know the full extent of its awfulness or how bad his Cabinet is, but enough has happened already to form some preliminary views.

It is by far the worst presidency in American history — far surpassing James Buchanan’s, Andrew Johnson’s, Warren G. Harding’s, and even Trump’s first term in cruelty, corruption, and incompetence.

It has the least qualified people working in it and the worst Cabinet ever assembled. Don’t just take my word for it. Polls show a majority of American voters are disappointed with Trump’s Cabinet members, registering a record-high level of dissatisfaction over the last four presidential administrations.

The regime is filled with bottom-feeders, frauds, fanatics, and fools — but so far, four really awful Cabinet members stand out (I’m not including Elon Musk, because he’s not officially in the Cabinet; in fact, he’s not officially in the Trump regime):

1. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth came to his job from being a Fox News host, knowing less about running anything than any other Cabinet member. This week he ordered that women in combat units meet the same physical fitness standards as men, a move likely to hinder the recruitment and retention of women. Last week, a journalist on Hegseth’s phone was accidentally included on a Signal message group chat in which sensitive military attack plans were texted, although Segseth denied war plans were being texted. Several high-profile initiatives he has made inside the department related to the southern border mission and a purge of “DEI” have been so unworkable they’ve been scaled back or rescinded. DoD officials say Hegseth seems more preoccupied with appearances than with substance — wanting to look more “lethal” than his predecessor. “Your job is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality,” Hegseth told reporters late last year. More Republican voters now think Hegseth should resign than think he should remain in his job.

2. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently downplayed a measles outbreak in Texas rather than attribute it to the fact of low levels of vaccination. He tapped David Geier, a longtime vaccine critic whose so-called “studies” have been rejected by judges and the government’s special vaccine courts, to run a CDC study of vaccines and autism. Kennedy pushed out Peter Marks, the head of the FDA biologics division who helped shepherd Trump’s Operation Warp Speed for Covid vaccines in the first term; Marks wrote in his resignation letter that “truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” Kennedy recently blamed the department’s 82,000 workers for a decline in Americans’ health. A large portion of them are being laid off (even though less than 1 percent of the department’s $1.8 trillion budget is spent on its staff), along with the revocation of $11 billion in public health funding for cities and counties. Former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf yesterday warned on LinkedIn that “the FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed. I believe that history will see this [as] a huge mistake.”

3. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday instructed the Justice Department to dismiss a lawsuit challenging a sweeping election overhaul that Georgia Republican lawmakers passed in the wake of President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state. On Sunday, she warned Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) to “tread very carefully,” following Crockett’s support for the the “Tesla Takedown” movement, while Bondi pledged the Justice Department’s protection for all Tesla owners. On Monday, she said the Department of Justice will seek a 20-year prison sentence for a man accused of throwing a firebomb at a Tesla dealership, yet she also said a criminal investigation into the “Signalgate” sharing of military operation details was “unlikely.” Meanwhile, she continues to attack federal judges who have struck down or paused portions of Trump’s agenda — calling them “out of control.”

4. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has turned his position into a clandestine shop for arresting and detaining international students and others legally in the United States. At a press conference last Thursday, he refused to give a justification for the arrest and detention by masked immigration authorities of Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, whose only apparent offense was writing an op-ed that the Trump regime disliked. Rubio said, “If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.” Rubio also noted that he has personally revoked dozens of visas, possibly “more than 300 at this point,” adding that “we do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.” Ozturk was sent to a detention center in Louisiana without being given an opportunity to speak with a lawyer and despite a court order. Possibly hundreds of visitors in the United States have had their visas revoked for political speech without any due process and disappeared just like Ozturk, Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil, and University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi, who has yet to be connected to any kind of political activism and whose whereabouts are unknown.

Hence, this week’s Office Hours question (admittedly, a hard one): In your view, which of Trump’s Cabinet officers is the worst?

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Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

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