Editorial written by New York Daily News Editorial Board
Donald Trump’s defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, already under fire from revelations about his scant qualifications, is facing the heat of an in-depth New Yorker magazine piece detailing his drunken mismanagement of the organizations Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America.
The detailed evidence doesn’t just disqualify Hegseth, but disqualify him many times over along various tracks. America cannot have a drunken defense secretary who is incompetent and more interested in chasing women who do not want to be chased.
From the perspective of pure managerial ability over what is by far the government’s largest department by budget and headcount, Hegseth is worse than merely unqualified. While some of his fellow cabinet picks simply lack much management experience, Hegseth has some, and it’s been dismal.
Not one but both right-wing veterans’ organizations — one with a tiny staff of fewer than 10 people — forced him out over the same series of management and financial impropriety concerns, several years apart, with employees giving consistent accounts of the same types of boorish and devil-may-care approach to management and spending.
If this was the case then, we shudder to imagine the man let loose on a department with close to 3 million employees and a budget exceeding $800 billion a year.
Then there’s the matter of the specifics of this mismanagement and his response to it. It wasn’t merely that Hegseth was terrible at organizing events or managing staff. He seems to have actively sought to use these positions for his personal gain, particularly to pursue women, including some who worked for him.
In fact, every sexual assault and harassment allegation that has so far emerged against him involves him being sloshed on the job, sometimes to the point of totally passing out, when he was supposed to be representing his organization.
