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Ep 81 - Back Porch Files: The Loyalty Résumé

  • Jun 5
  • 10 min read

There is a difference between giving someone a second chance and handing them a sensitive role inside the Pentagon. That difference should not require an advanced degree, a committee hearing, or a laminated flowchart from Human Resources. Yet here we are, in a political moment where the old rules of qualification seem to have been shoved into a filing cabinet and replaced with one question: did this person prove loyalty to Donald Trump?


When loyalty becomes the top qualification, government stops hiring public servants and starts staffing a throne room.
When loyalty becomes the top qualification, government stops hiring public servants and starts staffing a throne room.

The story of Elias Irizarry, a 24-year-old who pleaded guilty for his role in January 6th and later landed in a Pentagon policy office, is not just another strange little artifact from the Trump era. It is a window. It shows us something larger about how this administration thinks about power, service, and competence. In a normal government, a national-security role would raise questions about judgment, experience, temperament, and trust. In Trump’s second administration, the more important credential often seems to be devotion.


That is the new résumé. Not the professional résumé. Not the public-service résumé. The loyalty résumé. It does not ask whether you understand the agency you are about to lead. It asks whether you are useful to the movement. It does not ask whether you respect the mission. It asks whether you will help bend the mission toward Trump’s purposes. It does not ask whether you can serve the public. It asks whether you will serve the man.


This is not to say every political appointee must be some glowing nonpartisan super-genius descended from Mount Bureaucracy with a binder full of footnotes. Presidents are allowed to appoint people who share their worldview. That is how administrations work. Democrats appoint Democrats. Republicans appoint Republicans. Elections have consequences, and policy direction changes. But there is supposed to be a floor. There is supposed to be some basic relationship between the job and the person chosen to do it.


If someone is going to run Health and Human Services, they should have some serious relationship to public health, health policy, medical systems, science, insurance programs, or large-scale health administration. If someone is going to run Education, they should understand schools, students, civil rights, special education, student aid, or education policy. If someone is going to run Defense, military service matters, but so do scale, management, discipline, judgment, and respect for classified information. If someone is going to lead the FBI, the question is not whether they dislike the same enemies Trump dislikes. The question is whether they can protect federal law enforcement from becoming the president’s personal revenge department.


The Trump administration keeps answering a different question. It keeps treating loyalty, celebrity, ideological usefulness, television presence, and personal devotion as substitutes for relevant expertise. And that is where underqualification becomes more than an insult. It becomes a governing philosophy. It becomes the way institutions rot from the inside while the nameplates stay polished.


Take Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services. The problem is not simply that he is not a doctor. Some HHS secretaries have not been physicians. The real problem is that RFK Jr. came into one of the most important public-health jobs in the country after spending years undermining trust in vaccines and public-health institutions. Then he was handed authority over the very machinery that depends on that trust. That is not reform. That is giving the public-health steering wheel to someone who spent years sawing at the tires.


Public health cannot function as a culture-war content stream. It depends on credibility. It depends on people believing that guidance about vaccines, disease response, food safety, drug approval, and medical research is based on evidence, not factional politics. When health leadership is selected because it speaks the language of a political coalition rather than the language of science and public trust, the country does not get stronger. It gets confused, divided, and vulnerable to nonsense with a government seal on it.


The Surgeon General carousel only deepened that concern. Janette Nesheiwat, a Fox News medical contributor, saw her nomination collapse after questions about her credentials. Casey Means, aligned with the RFK Jr. health movement, was nominated despite lacking an active medical license and having not completed residency. Then came Nicole Saphier, a more conventionally credentialed radiologist and another Fox News medical contributor. The point is not that all three are identical. They are not. The point is that the process looked less like a search for the nation’s most trusted public-health communicator and more like a casting call filtered through television familiarity and movement approval.


That same pattern shows up in Education with Linda McMahon. She has business experience. She ran a large company. She led the Small Business Administration. None of that is nothing. But the Department of Education is not WWE with a student-loan portal. It deals with civil rights enforcement, students with disabilities, student aid, low-income schools, higher education oversight, and programs that affect millions of families. Running that department should require deep experience with education itself.


The sharper concern is that McMahon was not merely a person with limited traditional education experience. She was chosen in the context of a movement that has long wanted to shrink, weaken, or dismantle the Department of Education. That changes the appointment from a mismatch into a mission statement. It is one thing to choose an outsider to improve an agency. It is another to choose someone to lead an agency your movement treats as an enemy. That is like hiring someone to run the library because they have strong feelings about closing libraries.


Then there is Pete Hegseth at Defense. Hegseth served in the military, and that matters. It should not be dismissed. But serving in the military and running the Department of Defense are not the same thing. The Pentagon is not a cable-news set with missiles. It is one of the largest and most complicated institutions on Earth, dealing with global operations, weapons systems, alliances, procurement, classified information, troop readiness, nuclear policy, and life-or-death decisions.


The concern with Hegseth was always about scale, judgment, discipline, and seriousness. There is a difference between having opinions about the Pentagon on television and being responsible for the Pentagon when the secure phone rings. When the culture-war performer becomes the institutional leader, the question is not whether he can sound tough. The question is whether he can do the job when toughness is not enough.


The danger becomes even darker when the loyalty résumé reaches intelligence and federal law enforcement. Bill Pulte’s move from housing finance into the role of acting Director of National Intelligence is the kind of personnel decision that makes the record scratch. Housing finance is real work. But overseeing the intelligence community is not a casual side quest. It requires national-security experience, familiarity with classified threats, intelligence analysis, surveillance authorities, foreign adversaries, and the rules meant to prevent intelligence power from becoming political power.


Pulte had no obvious intelligence background. His apparent usefulness to Trump came from something else: a willingness to aim government authority toward Trump’s perceived enemies. That is exactly the problem. If the credential that gets someone noticed is their eagerness to target the right people, what happens when that person is placed near intelligence power? Apparently, if you can regulate mortgages, you can oversee the CIA. By that logic, my dentist should be cleared to land planes.


Kash Patel and Dan Bongino bring the same concern into the FBI. Patel has legal and national-security-adjacent experience, so the argument is not that he has never been near government. The argument is that the FBI Director is not supposed to be the president’s vengeance concierge. The Bureau is supposed to have independence from political pressure. It is supposed to enforce the law, not turn a president’s enemies list into an investigative calendar.


Bongino, too, had law-enforcement-related experience through the NYPD and Secret Service. But in recent years, he was best known as a partisan media figure and pro-Trump commentator. Law-enforcement-adjacent experience is not the same as FBI executive leadership. The Deputy Director helps run an agency responsible for counterterrorism, counterintelligence, cybercrime, public corruption, civil rights, organized crime, and national-security investigations. That is not a job for vibes in a tactical vest.


This is why security-state appointments matter so much. You do not have to abolish institutions to corrupt them. You can hollow them out. You can replace independent people with obedient people. You can make career staff afraid. You can teach everyone that expertise is suspicious, restraint is weakness, and loyalty is survival. You can keep the same seal on the podium while changing what the agency is for.


And then there is Elon Musk and DOGE, the billionaire version of the same philosophy. The lazy argument is that Musk is unqualified. That is not quite right. Musk has run companies. He has managed major private enterprises. He has experience in technology, manufacturing, rockets, cars, satellites, software, and whatever category X now belongs in besides “group chat with a stock price.” The issue is not whether Musk has ever managed anything. The issue is whether running companies qualifies someone to restructure the federal government.


A company is not a government. A CEO is not an elected official. Customers are not citizens. Terms of service are not constitutional rights. Public programs are not inefficiencies waiting to be deleted by a rich man with a spreadsheet and a chainsaw. The federal government handles Social Security records, Medicare systems, veterans’ benefits, disaster response, tax information, student aid, civil-service protections, sensitive data, public rights, and legal obligations. These are not clutter. They are the lives of actual people.


The private-sector slogan is “move fast and break things.” Government has to ask what happens to the people living inside the things you break. That is not red tape for the sake of red tape. That is democracy trying not to become a demolition derby. And when someone with enormous federal business interests is given broad influence inside government, conflict-of-interest questions are not some fussy ethics footnote. They are the whole porcupine in the filing cabinet.


Musk represents Trump’s favorite myth: the genius outsider who can fix institutions by disrespecting them hard enough. Government is broken, so bring in a businessman. Government is slow, so bring in someone who fires people. Government is complicated, so bring in someone who does not care about the complications. But sometimes the complications are the job. Sometimes the process exists because people have rights. Sometimes the paperwork is what keeps your benefit, your record, your privacy, or your job from being treated like clutter.


Seen together, these appointments tell one story. RFK Jr. at HHS. Linda McMahon at Education. Pete Hegseth at Defense. Bill Pulte near intelligence. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at the FBI. Elon Musk at DOGE. These people are not identical. Some have real credentials. Some have partial qualifications. Some have experience in adjacent fields. Some are wealthy. Some are famous. Some are ideological. Some are wrecking balls with business cards. But the pattern is clear.


Expertise is treated as suspicious. Institutions are treated as enemies. Television presence is treated as leadership. Wealth is treated as wisdom. Loyalty is treated as competence. Personal devotion to one man is treated as public service. That is the loyalty résumé. And once that becomes the credential that matters most, government stops being staffed to serve the country and starts being staffed to serve the ruler.


A country can survive a few bad hires. Every administration has them. But when bad hiring becomes a philosophy, when the wrong credentials become the most important credentials, when the question is no longer “Can this person serve the public?” but “Will this person serve the president?” then something much bigger is happening. You are not staffing a government anymore. You are building a court.


Government is not supposed to be a loyalty program. It is not supposed to reward the loudest performer, the richest outsider, the most obedient partisan, or the person most willing to turn an agency into a weapon. Government is supposed to serve the country. Not the ego of the man temporarily holding power. Not the movement around him. Not the grievance machine that treats expertise like treason. The country.


That standard may sound old-fashioned now. Good. Maybe we could use a little old-fashioned. Maybe we could use the radical idea that the person running public health should respect public health, the person running Education should understand education, the person running Defense should have the judgment to handle defense, the person running the FBI should be independent enough to say no, and the person touching federal systems should be accountable to the public.


Loyalty is not a qualification. Obedience is not expertise. Celebrity is not competence. Wealth is not wisdom. And government is not a prize booth for people who passed the Trump loyalty test. The loyalty résumé may get you hired in Trump’s Washington, but it does not make the country safer, smarter, healthier, freer, or better governed. It just makes the institutions weaker, louder, and more obedient. And that is exactly the part we should refuse to get used to.


SOURCES

Elias Irizarry Pentagon appointment after January 6 conviction - https://apnews.com/article/2d5bd099fc8f72559f5d0175e0e80385

Additional reporting on Irizarry’s Pentagon counterterrorism-related role - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/02/january-6-rioter-elias-irizarry-counterterrorism

Trump pulling Casey Means’ Surgeon General nomination and naming Nicole Saphier - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-pulls-casey-means-stalled-surgeon-general-nomination-picks-nicole-saphier-instead

Linda McMahon official Department of Education biography - https://www.ed.gov/about/ed-organization/meet-secretary-of-education/linda-e-mcmahon

AP/NPR reporting on Pete Hegseth Signal use and Pentagon watchdog findings - https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/03/pentagon-watchdog-completes-review-of-hegseth-s-signal-use/

Bill Pulte acting DNI appointment and Republican backlash over lack of intelligence experience - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/rubio-never-heard-trump-pick-pulte-matters-involving-us-intelligence-2026-06-03/

Additional context on Bill Pulte appointment and questions about qualifications - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/3/doesnt-seem-qualified-who-is-bill-pulte-acting-us-intelligence-chief

Dan Bongino named FBI Deputy Director and background as media figure/former Secret Service agent - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/24/who-is-dan-bongino-fbi-deputy-director-podcaster/

ProPublica reporting on Kash Patel waiving polygraph screening for Dan Bongino and other senior FBI staff - https://www.propublica.org/article/fbi-kash-patel-dan-bongino-waived-polygraph

Reuters explainer on Elon Musk’s DOGE, agency access, and federal workforce cuts - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/what-is-elon-musks-doge-how-much-money-has-it-saved-us-taxpayers-2025-03-04/

Reuters analysis on legal questions around Musk’s DOGE role - https://www.reuters.com/world/us/is-elon-musks-government-efficiency-drive-legal-2025-02-05/

Reuters report on Trump staffing second term with emphasis on MAGA loyalty - https://www.reuters.com/default/donald-trump-staffs-up-second-term-only-maga-loyalists-need-apply-2024-11-11/

Brookings assessment of Trump second-term staffing and loyalty emphasis - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/assessing-president-trumps-second-term-staffing-record/

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