While assembling the worst Cabinet the White House has seen since the last time John Mitchell dined alone, the president* didn’t simply choose his people based on sheer incompetence. Other vital factors included a dedicated hatred for the services each of their various departments provide, and for the people receiving those services, as well as an overwhelming sweet tooth for taxpayer-funded luxury travel.

So let’s take a look at all the best people and all the great public service they’re doing for us all.

First, there’s Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Development, who apparently is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act by ignoring it. From The New York Times:

The policy shift, detailed in interviews with 20 current and former Department of Housing and Urban Development officials and in internal agency emails, is meant to roll back the Obama administration’s attempts to reverse decades of racial, ethnic and income segregation in federally subsidized housing and development projects. The move coincides with the decision this month by Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, to strike the words “inclusive” and “free from discrimination” from HUD’s mission statement.

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But Mr. Carson dismissed the idea he was abandoning the agency’s fair housing mission as “nonsense” in a memo to the department’s staff earlier this year, and reiterated that point during recent congressional hearings. A spokesman for the agency, Jereon Brown, said any programmatic changes are part of the routine recalibration undertaken from administration to administration, rather than a philosophical shift. Advocates for the poor and career HUD officials say that Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, and his political appointees have begun weakening the department’s fair housing division at a critical moment. The agency now has its greatest leverage to right past wrongs thanks to the $28 billion in disaster recovery Community Development Block Grants that Congress has appropriated to rebuild the Gulf Coast and Puerto Rico after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.

Then, there’s our old friend, Scott Pruitt, at the EPA. He and his team of extraction-industry finger-puppets have put together some O-fish-ul talking points on the subject of the climate crisis, and they are real wing-dingers. From Vice News, via HuffPost:

“Human activity impacts our changing climate in some manner,” the memo reads. “The ability to measure with precision the degree and extent of that impact, and what to do about it, are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.”

Over at Health and Human Services, Alex Azar is presiding over an operation equally nervous about data that might, you know, help people. From NBC News:

The trove shows three appointees with strict pro-abstinence beliefs — including Valerie Huber, the then-chief of staff for the department's Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health — guided the process to end a program many medical professionals credit with helping to bring the nation’s teen pregnancy rate to an all-time low. Prior to serving at HHS, Huber was the president of Ascend, an association that promotes abstinence until marriage as the best way to prevent teen pregnancy. The $213 million Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program was aimed at helping teenagers understand how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. It had bipartisan support in Congress and trained more than 7,000 health professionals and supported 3,000 community-based organizations since its inception in 2010.

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This has become tough for the people in these departments who actually care about their work.

In the notes provided to NBC News, Evelyn Kappeler, who for eight years has led the Office of Adolescent Health, which administers the program, repeatedly expressed concerns about terminating the program, but appeared out of the decision-making loop and at one point was driven to tears. In a July 17, 2017 note, she says she was admonished to “get in line” and told it was not her place to ask questions about the agency’s use of funds. In a July 28 note, Kappeler recalled she was “frustrated about the time this process is taking and the fact that (her staff) has not been part of the discussions.” She described being “so rattled” that “my reaction when I got on (sic) the phone was to cry.”

It’s a madhouse, no question about it. But it’s a madhouse with a purpose behind it. The president* is so ignorant and/or vacant regarding just about everything having to do with his job that all the ambitious conservatives he hired have carte blanche to inject every ridiculous idea they read about in The Federalist into public policy. This is the real policy agenda of every one of those NeverTrumpers you see on TV. And it will remain their real policy agenda long after he’s gone. Trust me on this.

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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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