Dec. 4: Pete Hegseth May Have Drunk Himself Out of a Job

Supreme Court hears trans case; Health care CEO assassinated in Manhattan; Eli Lake on Kash Patel

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The Big Story

Donald Trump is considering replacing embattled secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth with one of several candidates, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, and Elbridge Colby, formerly of the Department of Defense, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and several other outlets.

Hegseth, a former Army National Guard major and combat veteran, is, as we’ve noted here before, both a foreign-policy hawk and a vocal critic of the Pentagon’s various social engineering experiments over the past decade. Indeed, as we observed in our Nov. 18 edition, Hegseth claims to have retired from the guard after being targeted as an “insider threat” and potential “domestic extremist” following the Jan. 6 riot, when the Biden administration began purging politically “unreliable” officers using a combination of the vaccine mandates, “countering violent extremism” witch hunts, and DEI-based promotion and hiring schemes. His crime? Visible Christian tattoos, including one of the Latin motto Deus vult, or “God wills it.” That background, as we said at the time, makes Hegseth an excellent candidate to reform the Pentagon. Plus, it helps that he’s not a general.

It seems clear, however, that Hegseth has had a turbulent personal life, to put it generously, and that personal life is now getting him into trouble. As we noted last month, the initial knock on Hegseth was that he was a racist and religious extremist, which appears to have flopped. Then his opponents dragged out a years-old rape accusation, related to a sexual encounter between him and a married woman at a conservative women’s conference in 2017. In a sense, that flopped, too. As Megyn Kelly explained in a comprehensive deep dive into the police report from that case, the available facts strongly suggest a consensual encounter that only became “rape” after the accuser’s husband discovered that she had not, in fact, fallen asleep on the couch in a friend’s hotel room, as she initially told him, but had gone back to Hegseth’s room after picking him up at the bar. The police, understandably, declined to file charges. Still, the details of the story were unflattering: Hegseth was revealed to be not only a serial philanderer who cheated on every one of his three wives (the third of whom was at home with their newborn at the time of the incident), but also a hard drinker, who several eyewitnesses testified was visibly inebriated on the evening in question.

Indeed, Hegseth’s alleged drinking and womanizing have been the recurring themes in a slew of damaging reports over the past week. On Friday, for instance, The New York Times published an email authored by Hegseth’s mother, Penelope, in the midst of his contentious divorce from his second wife in which she accused her son of having “abused” women by cheating on them and using them for his “own power and ego.” (Penelope has subsequently denounced the Times report and said that Hegseth is a “new person.”) A Sunday article in The New Yorker included further allegations of serial womanizing, and claims that Hegseth financially mismanaged not one but two conservative donor-funded veterans’ organizations: Veterans for Freedom, a nonprofit that Hegseth led from 2007 to 2011, and Concerned Veterans for America, where he served as president from 2013 to 2016. According to The New Yorker, Hegseth ran up large debts at VFF while throwing parties that “could politely be called trysts,” according to one source, and was pushed out of CVA due to colleagues’ worries about his alcohol abuse and his use of the organization’s funds as a “personal expense account” for partying, drinking, and chasing women. A Tuesday article in NBC News, moreover, reported that Hegseth “drank in ways that concerned his colleagues at Fox News,” including by getting “absolutely wasted” at company events and showing up to work smelling of booze. One gets the sense that Hegseth may have taken the David Allan Coe line—How do you spell relief? / I get D-R-U-N-K—a bit too much to heart.

The NBC charges are fairly piddling—drinking? In journalism??—and The New Yorker’s charges have been contested, not only by Hegseth but also by CVA trustee Randy Lair, who wrote in a 2016 letter obtained by the New York Post that Hegseth had not been pushed out but had “voluntarily resigned” due to a “difference of opinion as to the future of the organization.” Hegseth has also touted Trump’s support and claimed, in a Wednesday op-ed in the Journal timed to coincide with his charm offensive on Capitol Hill, that he’s the victim of a smear campaign, writing:

The press is peddling anonymous story after anonymous story, all meant to smear me and tear me down. It’s a textbook manufactured media takedown. They provide no evidence, no names, and they ignore the legions of people who speak on my behalf. They need to create a bogeyman, because they believe I threaten their institutional insanity. That is the only thing they are right about.

According to a Wednesday afternoon report in Politico, Hegseth has been promising Republican senators that he’ll quit drinking if he’s confirmed—a nice thought, but one that unfortunately echoes an identical promise made by John Tower, George H.W. Bush’s first pick for secretary of defense, who was rejected by the Senate over his … drinking and womanizing (Tower later authored a memoir in which he accused several of his former Senate colleagues, probably accurately, of also being drunks). Plus, an anonymous GOP senator indicated that Hegseth’s reassurances may be too little, too late. Speaking of the recent reports that Trump is considering replacements, the senator told Politico, “That’s sending the signal to everybody here that Hegseth’s not likely to survive.”

It’s a pity to see a soldier getting taken down for liking beer and women, though Hegseth, admittedly, appears to have taken his enthusiasm for both to extremes. We just hope that if he goes down, his replacement will be equally committed to what matters for this job, which is reforming what has become a corrupt and politicized defense bureaucracy into an organization that can once again win wars.

IN THE BACK PAGES: There’s an easy way to help the American workforce, argues Michael Lind—taking on credential inflation

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The Rest

→The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, which is the Biden Justice Department’s challenge to a Tennessee law banning doctors from prescribing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to, or performing surgeries on, minors for the purpose of gender transition. Lawyers for the government and allied groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the Tennessee law violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution by denying medical treatments to individuals on the basis of sex—the idea being, as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it today during her questioning of Tennessee Solicitor General James Matthew Rice, that it is unconstitutional to prohibit biological girls, but not biological boys, from taking Lupron to prevent the development of female breasts during puberty. The court’s conservative majority seemed inclined to support the Tennessee law, with Justice Samuel Alito, in particular, grilling Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio over the medical evidence behind youth gender medicine. A decision in the case, which could affect laws in the 26 states that have passed similar bans, is expected by June.

→The CEO of the insurance company UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was killed in Manhattan early Wednesday morning in what seems to have been a targeted assassination. Security footage shows a masked gunman lying in wait for Thompson outside the New York Hilton Midtown, where the victim was set to speak at the company’s annual investor conference, and opening fire with a suppressed pistol, at one point appearing to clear a jam from the weapon. (On X, Fox’s Bill Melugin said that “multiple law enforcement contacts” identified the weapon as a “Welrod,” a silenced, WWII-era bolt-action pistol favored by “pros for up-close, quiet work.”) After killing Thompson, the shooter fled into Central Park on a Citi Bike and remains at large at the time of our writing. Both the identity of the suspect and his motive remain unknown, though police sources told The New York Times that the assassin “knew which door Thompson was going to enter.” The Times also reported that the CEO had “recently received several threats,” though the source and nature of those threats is also unknown.

→Quote of the Day:

[Kash] Patel’s nomination [as FBI Director] could trigger a similar dynamic in Washington from 50 years ago, when, on the heels of the Watergate scandal, the Senate created a special committee to examine the intelligence agencies. That committee disclosed a veritable scandalabra, including the FBI’s psychological warfare against Martin Luther King Jr. and the CIA’s LSD experiments on unwitting prisoners and mental patients. It was the first and only time the American deep state received such a colonoscopy.

That’s from an article by Eli Lake in The Free Press on Trump’s new nominee for the FBI directorship, “Will Kash Patel Fix the FBI—Or Break It?” That title reminds us of the old joke about the anarchist getting interviewed by the immigration official at Ellis Island. “Do you advocate the overthrow of the government by force or by violence?” the official asks. To which the radical responds, “Either one is fine by me”

Read the article here:

Will Kash Patel Fix the FBI—or Break It?

→The IDF announced on Wednesday that six hostages, whose bodies were recovered from Gaza in August, were executed by their Hamas captors shortly before, during, or after an Israeli airstrike in February. According to a report in The Times of Israel, citing the conclusions of an autopsy performed by the Abu Kabir Forensic Institute, the six hostages, all men, had died from gunshot wounds delivered at close range. Their guards, whose bodies were also recovered in the raid, showed no signs of gunshot wounds and had instead died from the “by-product” of Israeli airstrikes on the tunnel complex in which they were being held. The IDF added, however, that if the men had not been executed, they would have also been killed by the airstrikes, which the military had ordered while unaware that any captives were being held in the area.

→On Monday, Politico provided a classic of the Obama-Biden messaging genre via a report on the Biden administration’s “mixed Syria feelings”—which, reading between the lines, add up to a feeling that Assad must stay. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told the press on Monday that “we want to see a de-escalatory path” in Syria and a “political process” similar to the one in Lebanon, while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN on Sunday that the United States has “real concerns” about the Turkish-backed Islamist group behind the recent anti-Assad offensive, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. “On the face of it,” Politico writes, “the U.S. urging de-escalation when anti-Assad groups have the advantage seems like a strange tack to take. Assad, after all, is a key ally of Russia and Iran.” Indeed—but that’s precisely why it should not be a surprise that the United States is urging de-escalation. Assad, after all, is a key ally of Russia and Iran.

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TODAY IN TABLET:

Havana, 1939, by David Lehman

Tablet Original Fiction

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The Re-Skilling of America

Instead of subsidizing America’s greedy and unequal diploma mills, how about dropping degree requirements and rewarding skills?

by Michael Lind

Should fewer Americans go to college? In 2022, 37.6% of adults without a disability had at least a bachelor’s degree. In 1990 only 20% of the older-than-25 population had a bachelor’s degree, and in 1970 the share was 11%. And yet according to the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, a decade after graduation with four-year degrees 45% of Americans work in jobs that do not require college diplomas. These unfortunate young Americans have wasted four years of their lives and tuition money, and in some cases have incurred sizable student loan debt, in exchange for coursework that is essentially worthless.

What explains the large-scale miscredentialing of the American workforce? The endless greed of tuition-hungry universities is one factor. But the main cause is the insistence of many American employers, including federal, state, and local government, that new hires have college diplomas—even for jobs that are currently filled by workers without four-year degrees.

Like other forms of inflation, degree inflation reduces the inflated unit of currency. Today a worker earning between $40,000 and $60,000 in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars is as likely to have a bachelor’s degree as a worker in 2006 who earned between $60,000 and $80,000, when there were fewer college graduates as a share of the workforce. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP): “Between 1990 and 2021, all occupational categories except one—teachers and librarians—experienced degree inflation, meaning the proportion of prime-age workers with a bachelor’s degree increased.”

There is no reason to believe that receptionists and bank tellers with B.A.s in popular majors like communications or business, to say nothing of gender studies, are more productive and skilled than their non-college-educated predecessors who had high school educations plus on-the-job training. According to a survey of employers by Bloomberg, college diplomas are most often used as a screening device for entry-level job applicants, rather than as evidence that the potential hires have job-relevant skills: “For more than half of employers surveyed (60 percent), a college diploma was seen as a stand-in for work ethic, personal skills and mental capacity, as opposed to the actual skills associated with the job.”

From the employer’s perspective, weeding out job applicants in favor of college graduates on the assumption that at least someone with a B.A. is likely to show up on time and complete assigned tasks may make sense. But wasting four or more years in college at a cost of $100,000 and up is a wildly inefficient way for graduates to prove they are more punctual and harder working than their peers. Worse, using college degrees as a simple sorting mechanism discriminates against the majority of Americans, whether from inner cities or rural areas, whose education ends with high school or some college, for a mix of cultural and economic factors that have no strong relation to either native intellect or the capacity for work discipline.

What if young people could acquire certificates for useful job skills that would encourage employers to waive the four-year-college requirement? For years pundits and policymakers have discussed the need for noncollege pathways to career success, and some firms and government agencies have begun to waive unnecessary college diploma requirements for applicants. The problem is that any attempt to replace four-year degrees with widely recognized skill certificates runs into barbed-wire barriers in the form of existing licensing requirements in many occupations. It is not enough to have a skills certificate, if you must also pass a federal or state licensing exam in order to work.

In their book The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality (2017), Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles point out that occupational licensing has risen from covering only about 5% of American workers in the 1950s to 15% in the 1970s to being required for around one in four today. Behind this explosion of occupational licensing requirements is the economic self-interest of practitioners of the licensed trade, who pressure state licensing boards to protect them from competition by making licensing standards artificially high. According to a study by the Obama administration, licensing requirements tend to produce a “wage premium” for licensed workers, ranging from a negligible one in the case of food preparation workers (think McDonald’s) to a percent wage premium of more than 15% for health care support workers and workers in business, finance, and education.

The danger that the artificially inflated incomes may fall with more entrants to the sector motivates occupational cartels to resist licensing reform. While minimal skill requirements are necessary in occupations involving health or public safety, many licensing requirements are deliberately made excessive in order to protect incumbent members of an occupation who influence the requirements of state licensing boards. In addition to boosting incomes in cartelized occupations by restricting competition, onerous state licensing requirements reduce interstate mobility because workers must get a new state license to work in the same profession when they move from one state to another.

The federal government can first undertake credential reforms in its own hiring. While federal employment is roughly 3 million jobs, or less than 2% of the national workforce, state and local governments tend to follow federal requirements while employing an additional 20 million Americans.

To date, attempts to overcome the balkanization of the American workforce by instituting universal licensing requirements have met only limited success. Twenty states have enacted “universal license recognition,” permitting workers licensed in other states to practice a trade. But as the Institute for Justice points out, the scope of these universal license recognition laws is limited by residency requirements (five states), rules that the previous state license must be “substantially equivalent” to the state’s own requirements, penalizing workers from states with less rigorous licensing (12 states). More generous jurisdictions, including Virginia and Arizona, allow transplanted workers to pursue their trades on the basis of a similar “scope of practice” rather than similar licensing requirements (eight states), while five states permit obtaining a license if the practitioner has at least three years of experience in an occupation.

State-level occupational licensing made sense in an agrarian America with mostly local markets. However, if a new constitutional convention were held today, it is doubtful that the delegates would set up a system in which dental aides may need to pass a different test each time they move across arbitrary state borders. At the same time, nationalizing education requirements for hairdressers and florists and casket sellers is unlikely to be a cause many national politicians would treat as a priority.

The good news is that technological innovation is likely to create many entirely new occupations, while rendering others obsolete. This may provide opportunities for exclusive federal government licensing in some cases and, in other new vocations, the outsourcing of state licensing to national nonprofit organizations. In aviation, an occupation that did not exist before the development of modern technology and one that is inherently national, the federal government is the sole licensing authority. Pilots must be certified at the national level by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. As telecommuting creates new jobs in which clients are in different states or countries than practitioners, the federal government can seek to preempt regulation, including licensing regulation.

Another option involves national licensing associations recognized by state authorities. One new technology-based industry is nuclear medicine, a field that uses radioactive tracers for diagnosis and treatment. A national organization, the Nuclear Medicine Technology Certification Board (NMTCB) was founded in 1977 as a nonprofit incorporated in Delaware. In 1978 the NMTCB administered its first exam to more than 600 students in 22 sites across the country. Today a majority of states require a license to practice nuclear medicine, and most of them waive a state exam for those who have been certified by NMTCB or by the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists (ARRT), a national nonprofit based in Mendota Heights, Minnesota.

As technological innovation creates new job categories—flying car mechanic? Robot pet veterinarian? AI-assisted virtual reality fantasy castle interior decorator?—states should be encouraged to outsource occupational certification to national nonprofits with national tests and national registries of certificants like NMTCB or ARRT.

A program to eliminate or nationalize occupational licensing requirements must be accompanied by policies to boost the power of workers, both licensed and unlicensed, to demand higher wages—policies that include unionization or sectoral wage boards, higher state or local minimum wages, and laws against the abuse by employers of noncompete agreements. Otherwise, the elimination of the wage premium caused by overly restrictive, cartellike state licensing schemes will cause the wages of everyone in the industry to drop. The goal must be to lower barriers to entry to the nursing aide profession without lowering the incomes of nursing aides.

Reductions of both legal and illegal immigration are also necessary in order to increase both access and wages. Lowering excessive barriers to entry in licensed occupations, or eliminating licensing of some trades altogether, will not improve the lives of American workers if they are forced to compete with great numbers of desperate immigrants willing to work for low wages in miserable conditions.

Providing greater career opportunities for young Americans who obtain certifiable skills as an alternative to obtaining a four-year college degree is necessary. But it will not happen overnight. Success will require greater nationalization and standardization of skills training, with states outsourcing more certifications to national nonprofit agencies, and with federal preemption of the regulation of new industries. And moving from our balkanized, state-based licensing system to an integrated national labor market will fail to raise the incomes of non-college-graduate workers, unless the power of those workers to compel employers to pay higher wages is enhanced by pro-labor laws and tighter labor markets.

Change will not happen overnight, but we can see how today’s overcredentialed and underpaid workers can be succeeded by workers who can go from high school to practicing a trade for a living wage without a costly four-year detour on a university campus in order to obtain a degree they are unlikely to ever use.