Dear Progressive Reader,

Donald Trump continues to announce controversial appointments for cabinet posts and other jobs in his administration. While many news outlets have commented on the key qualification for these choices (loyalty to Trump) and others have noted that fact that many have a common past experience (being hosts on Fox television programs), fewer have noted the other unifying item—lack of any experience in managing anything at all.

In Wisconsin, during the administration of Scott Walker, the renowned union-busting governor from 2011-2019, was particularly notable for his destruction of state agencies by pushing out anyone with any knowledge of how to run them. Numerous former state employees in various agencies have related to me stories of empty offices and the loss of institutional knowledge during the Walker years. In early in 2011, Walker replaced the longtime Department of Commerce with a new entity—the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). The announced goal of the new department was to create opportunities for business and “job creation” in a state that Walker had proclaimed was “Open for Business.” The result was anything but stellar. As Matthew DeFour reported in 2015, “The agency assumed fewer than half of the economic development programs Commerce operated, hired a mix of longtime civil servants plus new managers with experience in the private sector, and reported to a board made up of lawmakers and volunteers from the business community and headed by Walker.”

Trump, it appears, is taking a page from the Walker playbook, choosing appointees with no knowledge or experience in the agencies they will manage, in order to destroy things and blow stuff up in Washington. As former Georgia Democratic Congressmember Carolyn Bourdeaux writes in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “No one is going to want the destruction that the former president promises to bring. Just look at his record.” During his first term, the former President engaged in a constant shell game of changing agency heads and advisers, often removing people just as they were beginning to learn how the departments they were in charge of actually operated. The loss of institutional knowledge, and the continual appointment of partisan leaders in critical agencies and departments led to, among other things, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths of people before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Bill Lueders meticulously documented in The Progressive, Trump continually botched the government’s handling of the pandemic through funding cuts, mismanagement, and out-right disinformation. This time around, even without a global pandemic, we can expect similar attacks on science, knowledge, and expertise.

This week on our website, Armando Ibarra provides an analysis of the Latinx vote for (and against) Trump; Bill Blum looks at the ways the Trump campaign used hate to gain votes; and Nyki Duda examines the impacts of the spate racist text messages sent in the wake of the election. Plus, Mike Ervin analyzes the ways the new President could attack Medicaid funding; Rann Miller exposes the dark side of state takeovers of public schools; and David Helvarg addresses the dangers faced by the world’s oceans during a Trump presidency. Also, Joe George reviews the new film Lead and Copper, about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; Jeff Bryant highlights some victories for public schools in the recent election; and Nikki Marín Baena pens an op-ed on preparing to confront the mass deportations that Trump and his team have promised will begin on “day one.”

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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