OPINION: Now hiring time travelers – From expertise to absurdity
Published 4:30 am Wednesday, April 29, 2026
Donald Trump has appointed Gregg Phillips, a man who claims to have been involuntarily teleported on multiple occasions, to lead FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery.
The “best people” pledge has crossed into science fiction.
Phillips made his teleportation claims in podcast appearances, then repeated them in public. Even after those remarks surfaced, Trump moved forward with the appointment. This is the hire. This is the bar. Welcome to the second term.
The Phillips appointment is not an anomaly. It is the logical endpoint of a governing philosophy that prizes loyalty over literacy, devotion over demonstrated skill. Trump built his brand on competence; his record reads as its obituary.
The “best people” line has not merely aged poorly. It has collapsed. Senior White House staff turnover in his first term tripled Obama’s first-year rate and doubled Reagan’s. By 2019, Cabinet turnover exceeded any predecessor’s full first term. These were not the best people leaving. These were the last competent ones.
Turnover is not just a statistic. It severs institutional memory, drains expertise, and fractures the continuity that keeps agencies functional. Each loyalist swap scrambles planning, multiplies errors, and leaves fewer people in the room who know what they are doing. Chaos is not a byproduct of this management style. It is the method.
The second term accelerated the purge. “A Team” turnover reached 32 percent by April 2026. The federal workforce shrank by 9 to 10 percent in 2025 alone, erasing 238,000 positions as hiring froze. This was not streamlining. It was evisceration by spreadsheet.
The damage is institutional. DHS gutted hundreds of FEMA positions, then installed Phillips atop the ruins.
The Education Department scattered its programs across HHS, Labor, State, and Interior; eliminated civil rights enforcement offices; left disabled students without funding for months; and forced rural schools to wither as mismatched agencies fumbled responsibilities they were never designed to carry. Protections under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act now depend on bureaucrats who inherited them by accident. Trump calls it efficiency. Families call it something else.
He did not tolerate the hemorrhage. He engineered it. Schedule F, the executive order reclassifying federal workers in policy roles as at-will employees, was revived to strip career professionals of civil service protections. Inspectors general were dismissed. Probationary employees were purged across agencies. The architecture of independent oversight was not reformed. It was targeted.
Merit systems exist for reasons that predate Trump and will outlast him. They concentrate talent, reduce turnover, and preserve institutional capacity across administrations. Nations that govern well hire for competence, reward performance, and retain expertise. They do not confuse enthusiasm with skill or mistake a podcast for a credential.
Defenders of the chaos invoke disruption as though it were a virtue. It is not. Organizations that hire for loyalty over competence do not disrupt industries. They decay. Talent exits. Errors compound. Confidence collapses. The public sector version is no different, except citizens cannot take their business elsewhere.
What Trump’s record demonstrates is simpler than he suggests. The “best people” were never the objective. Compliance was. Dissent was punished, eccentricity rewarded, and a man who believes he has teleported now oversees the nation’s emergency response. That is not a punchline. Somewhere, a disaster is already forming.
Previous administrations hired qualified professionals with care. The next hurricane will not care who replaced them.
Van Abbott is a long-time resident of Alaska and California. He has held financial management positions in government and private organizations, and is now a full-time opinion writer. He served in the late 1960s in the Peace Corps as a teacher.
