This special report from Reuters is mind-boggling — or would be if we hadn’t already seen gobsmacking levels of stupid from “All the best people” with whom Trump surrounds himself.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - On January 21, the day the first U.S. case of coronavirus was reported, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services appeared on Fox News to report the latest on the disease as it ravaged China. Alex Azar, a 52-year-old lawyer and former drug industry executive, assured Americans the U.S. government was prepared.
...Azar’s initial comments misfired on two fronts. Like many U.S. officials, from President Donald Trump on down, he underestimated the pandemic’s severity. He also overestimated his agency’s preparedness.
And why these self-inflicted errors? One reason might be personnel choices.
Shortly after his televised comments, Azar tapped a trusted aide with minimal public health experience to lead the agency’s day-to-day response to COVID-19. The aide, Brian Harrison, had joined the department after running a dog-breeding business for six years. Five sources say some officials in the White House derisively called him “the dog breeder.”
Shades of George W. Bush and “Heckuva Job Brownie”, the Arabian Horse association guy.
Alexander Azar is a lawyer; his experience in healthcare involves working as a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry and as an executive for a drug firm. As for the man he picked to head up the task force, Brian Harrison, his key qualification seems to have been serving Azar as a trusted confidential assistant for a year…
Harrison, 37, was an unusual choice, with no formal education in public health, management, or medicine and with only limited experience in the fields. In 2006, he joined HHS in a one-year stint as a “Confidential Assistant” to Azar, who was then deputy secretary. He also had posts working for Vice President Dick Cheney, the Department of Defense and a Washington public relations company.
Before joining the Trump Administration in January 2018, Harrison’s official HHS biography says, he “ran a small business in Texas.” The biography does not disclose the name or nature of that business, but his personal financial disclosure forms show that from 2012 until 2018 he ran a company called Dallas Labradoodles.
But Wait — There’s More: GOP Deep State, The Pendleton Act, and the Spoils System
From Reuters on Azar:
Azar is a Republican lawyer who once clerked for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and counts current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a friend. Under George W. Bush, Azar worked for HHS as general counsel and deputy secretary. During the Obama years, he cycled through the private sector as a pharmaceutical company lobbyist and executive for Eli Lilly.
From Harrison’s official page at HHS:
Brian Harrison is the Chief of Staff at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He previously served as the Deputy Chief of Staff, a position to which he was appointed in January 2018. Mr. Harrison also worked in the office of the Deputy Secretary at HHS during the George W. Bush Administration, and has held positions at multiple other federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Department of Defense, and the Office of the Vice President at the White House. He has worked as a director at an independent public affairs firm, helping oversee their healthcare portfolio, and, prior to returning to government, ran a small business in Texas. He studied economics at Texas A&M University and lives in Arlington, Va., with his wife and three sons.
Harrison’s chief qualification for Azar appears to have been, besides the GOP background they share, the fact that he worked for Azar for a year as a confidential assistant, AKA loyal foot-soldier.
The inimitable Charles P. Pierce has picked up on a key operating dynamic here: personal and political loyalty over competence. Via a link to Politico, Pierce notes this tell:
...But the really interesting part comes along later in the piece, when it discusses a guy named Mike Rigas, who is a double-dip Acting. He’s the acting deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget as well as the acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, which is where he enters our story.
Rigas has told colleagues that he questions the constitutionality of the 1883 Pendleton Act, which codifies using merit to pick government officials, and believes that all executive branch employees should be political appointees, according to a person who has discussed the matter with him. The arrival of Rigas comes amid a push by McEntee and his allies to install other Trump loyalists across the executive branch.
McEntee is working in concert with Paul Dans, OPM’s new White House liaison and senior adviser, whose rapid efforts to consolidate his control over other agency appointees has irritated some officials. Dans has also castigated other OPM officials for relying on career employees he suspects are Democrats, according to two people familiar with the interactions. He also has been asking how many policy jobs the government can shift from career officials to political appointees, a line of inquiry the people saw as an effort to install Trump loyalists in key posts.
From day one, Trump’s blather about “Only the best people” has been just that: blather. The GOP handed him a party that runs on crony capitalism and purely partisan relationships, and he took it to new levels.
Trump has always made personal loyalty to him paramount over any pretensions to competence, non-partisan job performance, or the public interest. (Hi there Jared!) The story of Azar and Harrison is emblematic of how this administration has operated from the start.
Pierce takes us back to Chester A. Arthur, who had been a product of the spoils system. Unexpectedly becoming President Arthur upon the assassination of Garfield,
...Suddenly, he became a convert to the cause of civil-service reform. (Somewhere out there is a Disappointed Office Seeker with your name on it.) Democratic Senator George Pendleton, who’d been pushing for reform for a decade, found that his civil-service reform bill had some wind in its sails at last. Of course, it took the GOP’s pasting in the 1882 midterm elections to hand the Congress over to the Democrats, thereby giving Pendleton’s bill the final push to the president’s desk. Arthur signed it on January 16, 1883. Conkling never forgave his former protege.
And that’s where things pretty much stood, until Camp Runamuck blew into town three years ago and every damn thing went up for grabs. I can’t think of a worse time to go back to the spoils system than the current moment under the current administration*, the only real talent of which seems to be spoiling whatever it touches.
• Arthur has a relatively modest grave in Albany Rural Cemetery.
At at time when Americans are dying by the thousands because of incompetence and corruption at the highest levels, Trump and the GOP keep rolling merrily along, running America like a crime family looting the public trough. It looks more and more like the George W. Bush administration was a dress rehearsal for the Trump crime spree.
If we ever get the country back from the literal death grip the GOP has on it, a top priority in repairing the damage had better be a strong effort to look back and clean out this rot (and we should follow the money too) . We can’t move forward until the foundation under our efforts has been made secure.