In emphasizing loyalty as he selects his team for a second administration, President-elect Donald Trump often has overlooked another quality typically required for such jobs: High-level experience.
In the past, serving in a presidential Cabinet or as the head of a major federal agency usually came after many years of relevant experience at the heights of government or the private sector.
But Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Education has just a year of experience overseeing public schools, his nominee to lead the FBI has top-level experience in national security but not the criminal justice system and his pick to lead the Department of Defense left the National Guard as a midlevel officer.
Additionally, his pick to run the nation’s intelligence agencies is a midlevel reserve officer with limited intelligence experience, his pick to run the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation are former congressmen not known for expertise in those fields and his selection for health secretary is an environmental attorney and health activist turned longshot presidential candidate.
Many of these individuals have never managed large numbers of people, yet are poised to lead federal agencies that have tens of thousands of employees. In the case of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense secretary, he would lead roughly 3 million people after most recently working as a Fox News host.
Trump allies tout the picks as outside-the-beltway disruptors and strong communicators who will fulfill the president-elect’s promises to shake up the system. Their lack of time spent in Washington, D.C., is an asset, not a liability, some argue, making them less beholden to a system they view as needing reform. Many Trump voters across the nation are excited about the selections.
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The federal government has vast powers that extend to everything from war to delivering the mail, food safety and rescuing people in a disaster. Mismanagement of these functions can be catastrophic, and is made more likely when presidents elevate people primarily because they are political allies, not leaders in their fields, some experts believe.
The raft of inexperienced nominees amounts to a big gamble with some of the most important functions of the federal government, according to former federal officials and experts on public administration.
“The problem we’ve seen over time is that the more … you put emphasis on personal loyalty at the expense of technical capacity and leadership experience, the more that you’re likely to run into trouble when the inevitably bad, difficult, complicated things happen,” said Donald Kettl, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and former dean of its public policy school who wrote a book about government competency. “And so that’s the risk here.”
Questions about appointees’ qualifications have come up for past administrations.
Former Democratic President John F. Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy − whose son is Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary and also is facing questions about experience − as attorney general and many people felt he was not experienced enough, said Lindsay Chervinsky, a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. There are other examples, too.
“It’s always possible to pick at individual nominees for individual positions in individual administrations,” Kettl said.
But it’s unusual to have so many top appointees with such thin resumes in a modern Cabinet, said Chervinsky and Kettl.
“The overall lack of policy and management experience among Trump’s appointees is unprecedented,” Kettl said.
Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the president-elect’s victory was a mandate “to change the status quo in Washington.”
“That’s why he has chosen brilliant and highly respected outsiders to serve in his Administration, and he will continue to stand behind them as they fight against all those who seek to derail the MAGA agenda,” she added.
In recent decades, for both Republican and Democratic presidents, high-level experience was a basic qualification for these positions.
Trump followed that playbook with his first administration, taking a more traditional approach to stocking his Cabinet and often nominating Republicans with long histories of service and relevant expertise, from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to Attorney Generals Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr and former National Security Advisers John Bolton and H.R. McMaster.
In that sense, Trump’s second Cabinet is not just a departure from other presidents, but from his own record, Chervinsky said. One reason for that: Many of the people Trump hired in his first administration ended up becoming critics.
He has spoken bitterly about some of the personnel decisions he made in his first term, and wants people in his second term who are more committed to his vision.
Trump and his political movement also have been hostile at times to experts and the type of professional, technocratic leadership some view as synonymous with what they dislike about the federal government and how it has been run.
“This isn’t rocket science,” said Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga. “Ninety-nine percent of what you do in life is just associations, it’s networking, it’s people. There’s no formula over there in any of those agencies that’s a secret.”
A lack of appreciation for the complexities of public administration hampered Trump’s first presidency, though, said John Graham, an Indiana University professor who worked in former President George W. Bush’s White House in a Senate-confirmed job at the Office of Management and Budget.
Trump pushed for deregulation, which requires federal rulemaking, and a “very high proportion” of the rules proposed in his first term included “elementary errors,” Graham said.
“With good people, they would have been a lot more efficient and effective with doing their agenda,” he said.
Former Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., said some of Trump’s picks “may not have as much effectiveness as they would like,” because of the lack of management experience.
If the risk of having inexperienced people is an unintentional disruption or poorly executed policy, some Trump allies see them as better positioned to deliver the type of intentional disruption they are eager to see in Washington.
The fact that Linda McMahon, who served as small business administrator during Trump’s first administration and now is his pick to lead the Department of Education, has little experience with the public education system “does not matter to me,” said Tina Descovich, co-founder of conservative education activist group Moms for Liberty. It’s an asset in fixing a “broken” system, Descovich said.
“If something’s broken, you need to put new fresh ideas and faces in there and that’s Linda McMahon,” Descovich said.
More broadly, Descovich said people are tired of “out of touch elites making decisions on their behalf” and argued Trump’s nominees often are more representative of “ordinary people,” even as McMahon and others are extremely wealthy.
While many MAGA activists might view people with Washington experience with suspicion, lack of high-level credentials could be a concern for some senators during the confirmation process.
Trump ran on shaking up the system and was widely expected to have a less traditional Cabinet this time, but some of his unconventional picks are testing lawmakers’ willingness to depart from norms surrounding the resume needed to serve at the highest levels of the federal government.
“He’s chosen some nominees that are completely inexperienced, unqualified, whose only qualification is their utter, not even loyalty so much as sycophancy,” said U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
Schiff is most concerned about Hegseth, director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director nominee Kash Patel.
Hegseth is a combat veteran who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with the Army National Guard. He ran a pair of veteran’s groups but didn’t reach the highest levels of the military, other government agencies, or the defense industry, as defense secretaries typically do.
Instead, Hegseth attracted Trump’s attention as a Fox host who is outspoken about combating perceived “woke” military policies.
Gabbard also is a midlevel officer, serving as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. She spent eight years in Congress as a Democrat but didn’t serve on the Intelligence Committee. She spent her last two years on an intelligence subcommittee of the Armed Services Committee and also served on the Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees. Gabbard ran for president in 2020 as a Democrat and endorsed Trump’s 2024 bid.
Patel worked as a public defender and federal prosecutor before attracting Trump’s attention through his work for congressional Republicans pushing back against claims that Trump’s 2016 campaign coordinated with Russia. He joined Trump’s first administration as a deputy at the National Security Council and was chief of staff to the acting secretary of Defense when Trump left office.
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William Webster, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents and was the only individual to lead both the FBI and CIA, recently wrote a letter to senators raising concerns about Patel’s “impartiality and integrity” and what he described as Gabbard’s “profound lack of intelligence experience.”
Other Trump picks that raise questions about experience include his nominees for various health care roles, Lee Zeldin to run the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Sean Duffy to run the Department of Transportation. Zeldin and Duffy are both former congressmen without significant public profiles in the sectors they will oversee.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, worked as an environmental attorney for decades before running for president last year and endorsing Trump after dropping out. The health issue he is best known for is his criticism of vaccine safety, which he has pursued through his Children’s Health Defense nonprofit.
The nation’s health agencies are vast, spend huge sums and employ tens of thousands of people. Yet Trump’s picks to lead them don’t have experience running large federal agencies, and most haven’t held other high-level management roles.
Some of Trump’s nominees for top government positions do have considerable leadership experience and relevant expertise, including his picks for secretaries of State, Interior, Treasury, Homeland Security and Commerce, along with attorney general.
Concerns about experience are just one issue that Trump’s more controversial nominees are facing.
Hegseth’s personal life has drawn attention. He was accused of sexual assault, which he denies. Gabbard’s perceived sympathetic views about foreign dictators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Syria’s recently deposed Bashar al-Assad are concerning for some lawmakers, while Kennedy is a target for some conservatives because of his past support for abortion rights, and has faced questions about his vaccine skepticism. Patel’s critics worry he would compromise the DOJ’s independence and exact retribution on Trump’s behalf.
Trump has pledged to make big changes to federal agencies, and some of his more controversial Cabinet picks are expected to lead those efforts.
Trump’s agenda includes abolishing the Department of Education, overhauling the Department of Justice and intelligence agencies and rolling back military policies he opposes, including diversity programs.
The people he has chosen to lead these agencies are viewed as disruptors who will pursue aggressive policies, and their lack of Washington, D.C., experience is viewed by some conservatives as an asset, making them outsiders who will take on entrenched interests.
Hegseth has criticized “woke” military policies, a complaint echoed by Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas.
“The other side may have known how to manage groups of people … but their policies were disruptive within the organization,” Sessions said.
The federal government is complex, though, and lacking knowledge about how agencies work could lead to unintentional consequences if agencies are mismanaged.
“Experience does matter. Each of these agencies is very big and very complicated,” said Elaine Kamarck, founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at The Brookings Institution.
Kamarck worked in Democratic politics before joining former President Bill Clinton’s administration and leading its National Performance Review, known as the reinventing government initiative.
The effort cut regulations and federal spending. It also looked to the private sector to make government more efficient.
Trump has launched something similar with his new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by entrepreneurs and close allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Kamarck said there’s plenty about how the government functions that can be improved, but having a basic understanding of how government agencies work is important.
“The problem with inexperienced people is they don’t know enough about how it works in the first place to be able to fix it if it needs fixing,” Kamarck said.
The government also performs important functions that could spark an outcry if disrupted.
“The most serious consequence is it blows up in your face,” Kamarck said.
Kettl pointed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as an example of the pitfalls of staffing an agency with an unqualified leader.
Then-FEMA Director Michael Brown had little experience in emergency management when former President George W. Bush tapped him to lead the agency in 2003. A lawyer, Brown worked at the International Arabian Horse Association for a decade before joining FEMA as general counsel in 2001.
Brown led the Bush administration’s response to Katrina and was widely blamed for moving too slowly to help people.
Katrina has long been seen as a black mark on Bush’s presidency, one that hurt public confidence in his administration and hampered the effectiveness of his second term.
“There’s a kind of universal consensus at this point that the federal government’s initial response to the hurricane was kind of another disaster, just in itself, because FEMA fumbled the response,” Kettl said.
Graham believes these public administration skills are more important for the No. 2 person at an agency and those lower down the chain of command, though. Cabinet officials often are more figureheads than policy implementers, he said.
Many of Trump’s controversial appointees are media figures who are comfortable delivering a message.
“People who are going to be really effective communicators, that’s really something that’s important,” Graham said.
