What’s going on? It’s not clear, other than the usual: Under Trump, being an expert in policy, intelligence, or anything else means holding a tenuous position at best, and being in the federal government as a gaggle of possibly criminal idiots (see: Giuliani, Rudy) wreck much of what you’ve been working on over the course of your career has got to be soul-crushing from week one—let alone how bad it has to be in year three.
The net result is that, as in the State Department, the ranks of top Pentagon officials have been dwindling. Over a quarter of all Senate-confirmed defense positions are now vacant, and there seems little chance that most of those will be filled before the November 2020 election because (1) Team Trump has no need for policy experts to begin with, and (2) few sane people would agree to sign up for top positions in the last year of a maybe-survives-impeachment, maybe-doesn’t administration now famous for ignoring and belittling its own top experts—when Trump isn’t tweeting demands that they be thrown in jail because reasons. Continue reading