It's been a while since we checked in on the various primates inhabiting the administration*'s cabinet offices. I can't think of a better day to do it than Ryan Zinke's last day as Secretary of the Interior. As is the custom down at Camp Runamuck, Zinke leaves public service under both a cloud of scandal and a hail of writs.

The New York Times ran down the rap sheet when Zinke was shown the door shortly before Christmas.

Mr. Zinke, a former Montana congressman and member of the Navy SEALs best known for riding an Irish sport horse through Washington on his first day in office, oversaw mineral extraction and conservation on roughly 500 million acres of public land. He had become the subject of several federal investigations, one of which his department’s top watchdog has referred to the Justice Department, a potential step toward a criminal investigation.

The inquiries include an examination of a real estate deal involving Mr. Zinke’s family and a development group backed by the Halliburton chairman, David J. Lesar. Mr. Zinke stood to benefit from the deal, while Mr. Lesar’s oil services company stood to benefit from Mr. Zinke’s decisions on fossil fuel production...

Win McNamee Getty Images

Beyond examining the real estate deal, the Interior Department’s inspector general had faulted Mr. Zinke for allowing his wife, Lola, to travel in government vehicles, contrary to department policy, and chided him for using $12,000 in taxpayer money to take a charter plane after a talk to a hockey team owned by one of his biggest donors.

The inspector general has also been examining the secretary’s decision to block two Native American tribes from opening a casino in Connecticut after his office received heavy lobbying from MGM Resorts International. The entertainment giant had been planning its own casino not far from the proposed tribal one.

Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, who has been battling Dutch Elm Disease for some time now, may be the next one to go. The president* has been telling people for months now that he's had enough of Ross, who, as an added bonus, has become enmeshed in scandal regarding his stewardship of a currency laundromat in Cyprus, and regarding his strange inability to recall exactly how much money he has and where it might be located.

What may save Ross, at least for the moment, is that he is a critical player in the Republican effort to ratfck the 2020 census. But El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago's impatience can't possibly be held in check that long, and I suspect that the story of 2019 is going to be that the president* has too much on his mind to think long-term about anything except keeping himself and his spalpeens out of the sneezer.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Getty Images

However, let's also take a look at some members of the Cabinet who appear to be staying on. There is, for example, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who knows less about education than your cat does about quantum mechanics, but who is making sure that America's college students are imprisoned for life with crushing debt, and that the average for-profit college can bilk away to its tiny heart's content. But the most overlooked of the assembled grifting incompetents is probably Dr. Ben Carson over at Housing and Urban Development.

There is the grift, a classically Trumpian looting of the public purse for the private benefit of the Friends of Ben.

There is the incompetence, although whether this is deliberate or not, or both, seems to be open to some debate. From ProPublica:

To the extent that the new leadership was providing any guidance at all, it was often actively discouraging initiative on the part of employees. Shortly after the inauguration, a directive came down requiring employees to get 10th-floor approval for any contacts outside the building — professional conferences, or even just meetings with other departments. Ann Marie Oliva, a highly regarded HUD veteran who’d been hired during the George W. Bush administration and was in charge of homeless and HIV programs, was barred from attending a big annual conference on housing and homelessness in Ohio because, she inferred, some of the other speakers there leaned left.

HUD Secretary Ben Carson. Getty Images

And then there is the universal string theory of grift-plus-incompetence by which Carson and Zinke somehow get tangled up together. Back in October, Carson sent out a thanks-for-your-service email to one of his subordinates who was moving on to a job at Interior. The problem was that the woman was replacing the person there who'd been tasked with investigating Zinke's various scams and profiteering. Carson's email implied—and not without a certain logic—that Zinke was bringing in an unvetted political appointee who would bury the ongoing internal investigations of his conduct, as The New Republic reported at the time.

On Thursday evening, though, the story changed drastically. Heather Swift, the head spokesperson at Interior, denied in an email to BuzzFeed’s Zahra Hirji‏ that Zinke ever planned to replace Kendall with Tufts, and accused Carson of sending an “an email that had false information in it.” “This is a classic example of the media’s jumping to conclusions and reporting before facts are known,” Swift wrote, adding that Kendall is still in charge of the Inspector General’s office at Interior. Contradicting Carson’s email, Swift said Tufts was merely considered “as a potential candidate for a position” in the Inspector General’s office, not offered the top job.

The executive branch is a mess, and it has been ever since the clown car pulled up to the west gate of the White House. There is no actual Attorney General at the moment, only a presidential* coat-holder. The new Democratic majority in the House has a deep roster of new chairmen warming up in the bullpen. And the people who are staying are terrible, while the people who are coming in may be worse.

Nothing But The Best People is never not going to be funny.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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