The new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, was hired for the job because Donald Trump is a fan of the Fox News weekend show that the 44-year-old used to host.
Seriously, that’s it.
Trump bullied feckless Senate Republicans into confirming Hegseth, with his equally feckless vice president, JD Vance, having to cast a tie-breaking vote, because three Republican senators demonstrated backbone, in the face of reams of evidence that Hegseth is materially unfit to run a Subway shop, much less the Pentagon.
Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell and Lisa Murkowski all voted against the Hegseth nomination, joining the 47 Senate Democrats in opposing a guy accused of regularly being drunk on the job with several credible sexual-assault allegations thrown in for good measure.
As bad as all of that is, it’s gotta be worse that Hegseth demonstrated basic incompetence while running two tiny nonprofits, Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, both of which forced him to step down due to financial mismanagement.
A whistleblower at Concerned Veterans for America detailed in an email obtained by The New Yorker how Hegseth “treated the organization funds like they were a personal expense account.”
The Veterans for Freedom situation was demonstrably worse – to the point that the organization was forced to merge with another nonprofit to get out from under the failures of the Hegseth term.
According to Veterans for Freedom’s IRS filings, the organization, which Hegseth led from 2007-2009, saw its revenue drop from $8.7 million in 2008 to just $265,000 in 2010; by January 2009, the organization had less than $1,000 in the bank and debt exceeding $400,000.
Hegseth somehow parachuted out of there to the job at Concerned Veterans for America, which he led from 2011-2016, and drove from solvency to a $428,000 operating deficit by 2014.
Now he’s failing up to a job managing an $850 billion – billion, with a b – annual budget and 3.4 million employees.
On top of that, he’s regularly drunk on the job and abusive toward women.
But hey, he was good on Fox News on the weekends.
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Chris Graham
