“Yonder goes the Kennedy boy,” my mother said, peering out the kitchen window at a jeep tearing down the alley in back of the house where I grew up in Montgomery, Ala.
I was back there for a visit, exactly what year I don’t remember. Robert Kennedy Jr. spent a lot of time knocking around all over Alabama in his youth on one mission or another, enough that when he was campaigning for president last year, he called it his second home. What I do remember is just a sense of how spectacularly incongruous it felt to see the scion of the nation’s most famous political family speeding past the backyard.
“Spectacularly incongruous” also describes where Kennedy has ended up, after drifting from civil rights to environmentalism to the anti-vax movement, by many accounts wearing out his welcome at many points along the way. The son of Bobby Kennedy has helped Donald Trump get elected president. The anti-vax activist has been tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He would be the boss of thousands of scientists, but he comes to the post with his own set of confirmed opinions about everything from Ozempic (bad) to raw milk (good).
Kennedy hasn’t been shy about his intention to clean house in the vast bureaucracy, which includes the Centers For Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes for Health and the Medicare and Medicaid programs. He’s accused scientists and administrators at the FDA of being part of a corrupt system, and warned them to “1. Preserve your records and 2. Pack your bags.”
With an annual budget of $1.7 trillion and 80,000 federal employees, HHS also presents some inviting targets for the budget-cutting effort led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, which has been charged with finding $2 trillion in two years.
Like Kennedy, Matt Gaetz is from a family of politicians. His grandfather was a mayor and state senator in North Dakota who died of a heart attack after giving a speech endorsing Barry Goldwater at a GOP state convention. His father, Don Gaetz, is returning after an eight-year absence to the Florida Senate, where he once served as Senate president.
What Gaetz has been accused of sounds a lot like what Kennedy has been accused of, but it’s much fresher in the public mind. The release of the House Ethics Committee report, which was canceled when Gaetz resigned from Congress, has become a political football, and some Republicans have signaled that his appointment is a bridge too far. There’s even been speculation that Trump baited Gaetz to leave Congress for an appointment that would be dead on arrival so he could get him out of the way.
Don’t believe it. Trump wants Gaetz to be his attorney general, and none of the grumbling about this guarantees that he won’t succeed. Even if he doesn’t get Gaetz in charge of the Justice Department which has investigated him, he has several other appointments which have in common a strident opposition to one part or another of the federal government.
In past statements, Gaetz has shown enthusiasm for doing to the FBI what Kennedy has said he wants to do to the FDA, and other cabinet appointees have voiced similar opinions about the nation’s military, its intelligence community and its foreign alliances. They have taken aim at various parts of the federal government, but taken together, they amount to a radical assault on all of it.
With so many controversial appointees, the choice of a Navy and Air Force chaplain to head the Veterans Administration should make for a breeze of a confirmation. Former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins will have an easy pathway to a tough job. A succession of directors have promised to root out inefficiencies and modernize the nation’s healthcare system for military veterans.
The former Gainesville congressman has also talked about rooting out corruption, firing VA personnel and privatizing some VA services. But the director of one veterans service organization expressed relief that Trump’s choice was not someone “more extreme” on the issue of privatization, like former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was under consideration for this job as well as the post she’s been nominated for, director of national intelligence.
Gabbard, by the way, is the daughter of a Hawaii state senator. What is it about these politicians’ kids?
