#WTH: Forget Signalgate

It's incompetence that's the problem

I have no hot take on Signalgate. I like Mike Waltz, and good people screw up. The frenzy around this lapse is out of proportion to its importance. But… Signal-gate is emblematic of a more serious problem at the heart of the Trump administration: Competence.

Let’s agree that Mike was foolish to add Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg to a group chat. Or to have a group chat on Signal about a matter as secret and as important as an impending military strike. But let’s also agree that every single other person in that message group never looked at the list before exchanging sensitive national security information. Here’s my checklist: Discussion of strike on Houthis? Check. Inter-agency coordination? Check. Making a balanced decision to move on terrorists attacking global shipping and allies? Check.

Doing it on Signal? 🤦🏼‍♀️ CC’ing a reporter? 🤯

Too often, the Trump administration wants to do the right thing, and is incompetent in executing. This isn’t true for everything (see: Ukraine policy), but it’s true for a lot of things. Take current DC poster child, object of endless laments and headlines — the Agency for International Development (USAID): Is the organization broken? It really is, and desperately needs to be linked to policy, to be reformed, and to be rethought. Does USAID care more about outputs than impact? You bet it does (see: Haiti). Are USAID staff detached from our democratic political reality? Yep, they are. Because they believe they will be there long after President X will be gone. And the same is true at the State Department and around the federal government.

So what’s the solution to that problem? Is it a chain saw? A blow torch? Or to put the question another way: Why can the White House do a 180 day review of U.S. United Nations policy, but not do the same for its own agencies? Surely, Donald Trump doesn’t think saving kids with AIDS is a bad thing. What about competing with China? He’s told us repeatedly that he wants to do that.

Right now, depending on where you sit on the ideological spectrum, you’re thinking Dany is in the tank for the libs or making excuses for evil orange man. Neither is true. I’d love to ax the terrible programs that we taxpayers underwrite, and I’d love to support things that really matter to Americans at home and abroad.

I don’t believe democracy promoters who explain they’re doing great work in Rwanda, because they’re not, and I see the evidence. I don’t believe Elon Musk, who cherry-picks stupid programs that shouldn’t exist, but is merely chewing at the edges of a federal behemoth and pretending he’s making a big difference. I just want competent leadership and stewardship of our precious tax dollars.

Proponents of the status quo — the entire legacy media, the Democratic Party, the liberal elites — insist that all government programs make America and the world a better place. Ask anyone who’s been at the VA to endorse that take. Sure, they’ll allow that there are a few bad apples, but that, they will sigh, is the price of being a great power, blablabla. Proponents of reform will tell you that trying to reform the federal government is an exercise in futility, the kind of task that gave Sisyphus a bad name. They too are right. And that’s where Donald Trump and Elon Musk come in; blow it all up, they say, and let’s start again.

I know all too well that reform is a hugely difficult task. If you downsize an aspect of the government, others will find a way to plus up another. Once upon a time, Congress put in place a governing board to ensure that America’s surrogate radios (which provide real news in places like Russia and China) weren’t being corrupted by career bureaucrats. The board became worse than the bureaucracy. A later Congress abolished that board and created a new managing entity. Ditto. And then again.

Another example: Congress put in place restrictions on assistance to the West Bank and Gaza to try to ensure money didn’t end up with Hamas. It did. So did food aid. So did international aid. Congress said any organization that admits a “State of Palestine” couldn’t get U.S. tax dollars. But they do. This is just in my little corner of the world, but one can imagine things are exponentially worse at the Social Security Administration and with Medicare/Medicaid.

Then again, let’s note that Team Elon has not abolished Medicaid or Social Security. Instead, they have gone with a wrecking ball at the things that they can eliminate, whether or not they deserve it. And this brings us back to the competence question.

Does the U.S. government need oversight? Damn straight. Do programs need to sunset if they’re not needed? Yes. Do we need to measure impact as well as expenditure? Also yes. Should we stop funding evil like UNWRA and end programs that subsidize Hamas? Obviously. But there are programs that do good, and need fixing by determined actors inside the Executive Branch working with Congress. The fact that the Trump administration appears entirely capable of identifying a need for action, and entirely incapable of executing without a fiasco is a signal failure (pun intended).

It’s not enough to want to do the right thing, like bombing the Houthis and coordinating with the national security team. You have to also be able to do it without cc’ing Jeff Goldberg, or, if you prefer, without incurring endless lawsuits, without slashing and burning programs that matter, without tanking the stock market, without imposing and then lifting tariffs, without firing the nation’s nuclear weapons techs, and on and on and on. Competence matters.