Even in an administration teeming with people who would ordinarily be considered unqualified, Donald Trump’s nomination of Rick Perry to lead the Department of Energy suggested new depths of contempt for the machinery of government. Perry, after all, was famously unable to recall during a presidential debate that the Department of Energy was one of three agencies he wanted to eliminate (“Oops”). Even after accepting the job, it seemed he still wasn’t fully up to speed on what the Department of Energy actually does. (As it turns out, the job has less to do with being a “global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry” than overseeing the country’s vast, and terrifying, array of nuclear weapons.) In his confirmation hearing, Perry said he regretted having called for shuttering the agency and admitted that he didn’t know, at the time, what the D.O.E. did.

Perry, having prostrated himself before the Senate, was confirmed in March. But it’s not clear that he’s figured out how to run the $30 billion department, which has some 100,000 employees. As Michael Lewis documents in his latest feature for Vanity Fair, Perry hadn’t expressed much interest in learning about the Department of Energy in his first four months on the job, according to a source within the agency:

. . . in his hearings, Perry made a show of having educated himself. He said how useful it was to be briefed by former secretary Ernest Moniz. But when I asked someone familiar with those briefings how many hours Perry had spent with Moniz, he laughed and said, “That’s the wrong unit of account.” With the nuclear physicist who understood the D.O.E. perhaps better than anyone else on earth, according to one person familiar with the meeting, Perry had spent minutes, not hours. “He has no personal interest in understanding what we do and effecting change,” a D.O.E. staffer told me in June. “He’s never been briefed on a program—not a single one, which to me is shocking.”

What Perry has been doing, Lewis explains, is mostly ceremonial: “He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that D.O.E. program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs.” He attends Trump rallies, like the unhinged speech Trump delivered Monday before thousands of ecstatic and perplexed Boy Scouts. And, as it turns out, he discusses sensitive policy issues with Russian pranksters pretending to be the prime minister of Ukraine. Per Reuters: