During the course of the 2016 Presidential Election, many took note of the now President Donald Trump’s lack of political experience. Many voters however, interpreted Trump not being a politician as a positive attribute as it meant he was an “outsider” who would better reflect the interests of the common citizen. Never mind that he is a businessman who according to Forbes, currently has a net worth of 3.7 billion dollars. But what about his cabinet? Now that Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States, public attention has been directed to his picks for the Presidential Cabinet as well. Most notably, there has been recent controversy over Betsy DeVos, who was confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of Education and Jeff Sessions who is now the Attorney General. But how qualified are they for their jobs, and who else does President Trump have in mind for his cabinet?
Relative to the previous Obama Administration, New York Daily news writer Sean King has discovered that there is a massive drop off in the education of Trump’s picks for his cabinet. For example, there is a stark contrast to be found between Obama’s picks for Secretary of Energy and Trump’s pick, Rick Perry. Obama’s pick for his first four years of his presidency was Steven Chu, who is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who is currently the Professor of Physics and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He also has a B.A. in Math, B.S. in Physics, and a Ph.D. in Physics. Chu was then succeeded by Ernest Moniz, who earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University and went onto join the faculty at MIT and became the head of the physics department and co-chair of the MIT Research Council. However, Rick Perry, Trump’s choice, failed his college chemistry course and a copy of his transcript from Texas A&M, where he graduated from in 1972 with an Animal Science degree, is riddled with a number of C’s and D’s. Additionally, he claimed during a presidential debate in 2011 that if he were to become president he would abolish the Department of Energy, despite at the time not even being able to name the Department of Energy because he forgot the name of the department, “The third agency of government I would do away with-the education, uh, the, uh, commerce and let’s see. I can’t-the third one. Sorry. Oops,” Perry said. He later identified the Department of Energy as the agency he had been trying to name but if he so strongly disagreed with the agency in the first place to want to abolish it how could he forget it so easily?
Other picks include Rex Tillerson for the Secretary of State, who did not attend a grad school at all, and Steven Mnuchin who doesn’t have a graduate degree of any kind. As for Betsy DeVos, she has a bachelor’s degree from Calvin College, did not attend any public school, and has no experience with college financial aid or management of higher education. The previous Secretary of Education under Obama, John King, Jr., has a B.A. from Harvard, master’s degree and Doctorate from Columbia, and a law degree from Yale. If anything, shouldn’t at least the head of the Department of Education be highly educated?
One might argue that Trump’s picks don’t require massive amounts of education because they are still rich and successful, but education does matter. College campuses are often where people are challenged with, “new ideas, new cultures, and opposing viewpoints that don’t quite match their own” (King. Huge Education Level Drop-off with the Trump Cabinet Picks. NY Daily News). President Trump and his cabinet nominations are going to be a part of very complex and robust systems, and to see such a steep drop in education level is not only disappointing but possibly dangerous.
