It's official: Ivanka Trump has a White House gig.

Until this week, President Donald Trump's daughter only held an informal role in the administration, even though she had a West Wing office and was sitting in on all manner of meeting. Ethics experts, understandably, had a problem with that arrangement, since it meant that Ivanka Trump didn't have to abide by government ethics rules. She assured everyone she would "voluntarily" follow those dictates anyway, but c'mon.

So in a sense, giving her role some formality – which requires her to really adhere to ethics mandates, rather than treat them as just guidelines – is an improvement. But coupled with the ascension of Ivanka's husband Jared Kushner to the head of no fewer than four major administration projects, it's a troubling sign that an insular White House, already far behind on filling vacant government positions, is turning even further inward.

Regarding Kushner, it's become quite the joke in Washington that he appears to be tasked with solving every intractable problem the government faces. Middle East peace? Kushner is on it. The opioid crisis? Kushner's on that too. Improving bureaucratic innovation? Kushner. Criminal justice reform? You guessed it: Kushner.

That's quite a lot to expect of someone whose previous work experience consists of inheriting the family real estate business and running a New York newspaper.

Ivanka Trump, meanwhile, whose prior endeavors are overseeing a fashion brand and working in the family's Trump Organization, is going to be handling who knows what for her dad. Her main contribution to the political discourse thus far has been a half-baked proposal to help wealthy people pay for child care, but she's supposedly going to be sitting down with German Chancellor Angela Merkel sometime soon, so there's that.

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There's a nepotism problem at work here, of course. As U.S. News' Ashley Pratte wrote last week regarding Ivanka's informal White House job, "Just imagine if this were Chelsea Clinton being named to a high-profile position in her mother's administration with access to classified information – conservatives would surely put up a fight." In addition, elevating her puts another check in the broken-pledge column for her father, who previously said his children would have no role in the government.

And like father, like daughter, Ivanka Trump brings some ethical baggage with her to the West Wing. Just as the president hasn't really divorced himself from his personal business, setting up the opportunity for all kinds of conflicts of interest across the government, so too has Ivanka Trump not severed herself from her financial interests, even as her White House gig goes unpaid.

Instead, her brother-in-law is overseeing her assets in a trust, while her lawyer, per the New York Times, will "flag any potential conflicts of interest to Ms. Trump, who can exercise veto power or recuse herself from White House business."

This is a wink-wink-nudge-nudge, not-at-all-good-enough separation of Ivanka Trump from her self-named brand; we're all being asked to simply trust that she'll make good decisions regarding the intersection of her company and the government's business.

And her track record in this area is already spotty – remember her hawking the bracelet she wore during a "60 Minutes" interview? – never mind the fact that another White House adviser also went on TV to exhort consumers to "Go buy Ivanka's stuff."

So that's all bad and worrying. But the biggest issue at play in the elevation of Donald Trump's child to prominent White House adviser is that he continues to rely upon an inner circle which has no experience in governing to run the government, with predictable results. Meanwhile, he's leaving the rest of the day-to-day business of keeping the country afloat to rot.

Trump currently has, according to a joint effort by the Washington Post and the Partnership for Public Service, 491 Senate confirmable positions for which he has nominated nobody and no one. He has 41 nominations awaiting confirmation and has managed to see just 21 people actually get an aye vote from the Senate.

That's hundreds of jobs, including those of the deputy secretaries of several cabinet agencies, that simply aren't being done. Instead, Trump is counting on a few family members and hangers-on from the campaign to do everything – so we get haphazard junk like his meaningless executive orders and barely thought-through strategy for repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

Now, don't get me wrong: Many of Trump's priorities are so abhorrent that having his team stumble over its own shoelaces instead of accomplishing them is indeed preferable. Every time incompetence wins out over the administration's malevolence is a win for America.

But at the same time, there are things government has to do – like, say, ameliorating opioid addition, improving American child care policy or simply ensuring that the gears of the administrative state keep grinding – and it'd be nice not to have those tasks outsourced to people whose only real qualification is being related to the president. There will be a crisis when Trump is in office – it's simply inevitable. On that day, we'll need more than two inheritance babies to step in and manage things.