President Donald Trump’s Cabinet picks brought a raft of high-profile, highly unqualified types like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. But we already know all about their staggering amount of shortcomings. What about the less well-known nominees, the small-timers hoping to get into the slightly lower rungs of government service despite having no skills to do so?
When it comes to pushing these motley nominees through Congress, the administration has one strategy: inflating their credentials. The fact that they have to do so highlights that the administration that says it is hiring on merit is instead just a dumping ground for grifters and lower-tier influencers.
Bryan Bedford, Trump's nominee to run the Federal Aviation Administration, testifies at the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, on June 11.
Over the weekend, we learned that Trump’s pick to run the Federal Aviation Administration, Bryan Bedford, seems to have lied about holding a commercial pilot license. This was no momentary error, as Bedford’s page on the Republic Airways’ website, where he is currently president and CEO, listed him as holding a commercial license back to at least 2010. When Bedford spoke at conservative Liberty University in 2019, he was introduced as holding “commercial, multi-engine and instrument pilot ratings.”
While Bedford doesn’t have a commercial pilot license, he does have a television appearance on CBS’s “Undercover Boss.” Bedford went undercover at his own airline by posing as a flight attendant for the show, a move which landed him in hot water with the FAA because actual flight attendants go through safety training and have to adhere to government regulations.
So what does the administration do with the fact that for at least 15 years, Bedford lied about holding a license in the exact field he would now regulate? First, they tried flat denial, saying Bedford “never misrepresented his credential; it was an administrative error that was immediately corrected.” What administrative error that might be is left to the imagination.
The airline website was “immediately corrected” after being wrong for 15 years? Then the DOT pivoted, parsing words in the most dishonest way possible to try to cover for Bedford. Sure Bedford said he had a commercial license, but he never “personally nor publicly claimed to be a commercial airline pilot.” Of course, that’s not the issue. Bedford claimed to hold an aviation license he does not, which isn’t the same as saying you’re a commercial airline pilot.
Bedford isn’t the only subpar candidate that the administration has to inflate credentials for. Casey Means is Trump’s latest surgeon general pick after his previous choice, Janette Nesheiwat, was ousted because conspiracy-theorist and 9/11 denier Laura Loomer thought she wasn’t anti-vaxx enough. Means has never practiced and left her residency before completing it. Instead, she’s spent her time hawking dubious wellness products while also failing to disclose she has a financial relationship with those companies.
Dr. Casey Means, a wellness influencer, left, and journalist Megan Kelly, attend a confirmation hearing for RFK Jr. for the Secretary of Health and Human Services post, at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 29.
Kennedy knows full well this isn’t the sort of resume a surgeon general should have, but he doesn’t really have a lot to work with as far as Means’ meager resume. So he’s tried to hype her time in medical school and her residency, a distinctly weird thing for someone who is supposed to be experienced enough to oversee America’s health.
When doing a softball Fox News hit on Means last month, Kennedy said that “during her residency, she won every award that she could win” and that she was “at the top of her class at Stanford” but left traditional medicine because “she couldn’t get anybody within her profession to look at the nutrition contributions to illness.”
A few problems here. Stanford grades medical students pass/fail, so no such thing as top of the class there. One of Means’ residency supervisors also undercut the claim she left because she needed to be free of the shackles of traditional medicine and its failure to look at nutrition. Rather, he said, he wasn’t even sure she wanted to be in medicine and did not like the level of stress. After taking three paid months off to address her anxiety, Means left the program.
After ousting all of the actual experts on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, Kennedy is filling that committee with people whose main qualifications are rabid anti-vaxxer sentiment. In a stupidly long post over at X, Kennedy said Michael A. Ross is a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University.
Except he’s not: He hasn’t worked at GWU in eight years, and hasn’t been at VCU in four years. He appears to just be a private equity guy now.
And let’s not forget Paul Ingrassia, Trump’s pick for the Office of Special Counsel. Trump described him as a “highly respected attorney, writer, and Constitutional Scholar.” In reality, Ingrassia’s career consists of being a far-right troll and representing notorious misogynist Andrew Tate, albeit before he even had a law license.
If Trump’s picks could stand on their own, the administration would not have to be constantly inflating their achievements. Instead, it is pretending these people who are chosen for being rabid ideologues, television personalities, or both, are actually the most-qualified people for the job. The rest of us, though, don’t have to play along.
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