Although he didn’t take an official role in President Donald Trump’s administration this time around, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson is proving to be quite the jack-of-all-trades.
When the onetime neurosurgeon isn’t showing up at the Religious Liberty Commission to basically agree that the Declaration of Independence and the Bible are the same thing, really, he’s now going to be a sort of roving expert on nutrition, health, and … rural housing?
Urban and rural housing! Talk about range!
On Wednesday, Carson was sworn in as the national nutrition adviser at the Department of Agriculture. Besides his nutrition/health/housing portfolio, he’s also supporting Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ work on the Make America Healthy Again Commission. Makes sense, really. Can’t let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have all the fun issuing incoherent reports.
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Oh wait, sorry. Carson is also going to be the “Department’s chief voice” on rural health care quality. Got it.
Carson is just as qualified for all of this as he was to be HUD secretary during Trump’s first term—which is to say, not at all. His tenure in that position will largely be remembered for referring to enslaved people brought here in chains as “immigrants” and spending $31,000 on a conference room table.
Even in Carson’s glowing bio, you see no mention of nutrition, housing, or health care, save for him reminding people that he was the HUD secretary. Otherwise, it’s a litany of his neurosurgery accomplishments in the 1980s and 1990s, which has a vague “30-year-old still bragging about his high school football years” vibe to it.
Carson is emblematic of the administration’s approach to everything: piling multiple jobs on people with no qualifications. There’s Lindsey Halligan, who was chosen to wreck the Smithsonian based on her past role as one of Trump’s personal lawyers, and is now also going to be the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Or how about a different former Trump personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, who is both deputy attorney general and the acting librarian of Congress, because why not?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has an ever-shifting number of jobs, but the one he is definitely least qualified for is being head of the National Archives.
Ric Grenell, when not wrecking the Kennedy Center, apparently also travels overseas to secure the release of U.S. citizens and also oversees the federal response to wildfires, because those are definitely all things that go together.
And last and certainly least, there’s former “Real World” star Sean Duffy. Not content to be wildly unqualified for his primary job as transportation secretary, he’s also now running NASA.
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This multiple-job nonsense is partly borne out of a lack of regard for government service. Trump doesn’t care who runs the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress, as long as they are ideologically aligned with Trump.
But the reality is that Trump, having fired agency heads with actual experience, has no desire to replace them with career employees from said agencies, and also doesn’t want to have new nominees go through the Senate confirmation process. So, he can take someone already confirmed by the Senate for one position and just double them up elsewhere.
Meanwhile, Ben Carson will decide what food your kids eat, which hospitals serve your rural community, and what rural housing you can access, and … come on.
Why are we pretending he’ll do any of those things? Carson will just be another weird MAHA mouthpiece ranting about food additives or whatever. But hey, at least he’s getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to honor all his accomplishments—whatever those are.