My first thought was Betsy DeVos, but I have to place her 2nd to Scott Pruitt.
I’ve prepared a list of who’s been nominated so far. Nominations are still open; please lobby for your choices of Most Loathsome so we can assign preliminary ranks. I’ve marked “©” for the loathsome officials who have been convicted of crimes; please inform me of any errors.
Eligibility:
To be eligible, the nominee must have been considered a Cabinet official during some or all of his period of loathsome activity. National Security Adviser is not considered a Cabinet position, but Sec’y of State Kissinger gets credit for war crimes committed when he was NSA.
Positions presently considered Cabinet level are 23 positions requiring Senate confirmation:
Secretary of State
Secretary of Treasury
Secretary of Defense
Attorney General
Secretary of Interior
Secretary of Agriculture
Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Labor
Secretary of Health & HS
Secretary of Housing & UD
Secretary of Transportation
Secretary of Energy
Secretary of Education
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Secretary of Homeland Security
Trade Representative
Director of National Intelligence
Ambassador to UN
Director of OMB
Director of CIA
Administrator of EPA
Administrator of SBA
Chief of Council of Econ. Adivsors
and two positions for which no Senate confirmation is needed:
Vice President
White House Chief of Staff
This rule means that the following high officials with criminal convictions are ineligible
John Ehrlichman ©
Michael Flynn ©
David Petraeus ©
Lewis Libby ©
Prime contenders
Betsy DeVos
Scott Pruitt
James G. Watt ©
Albert Fall ©
Earl Butz ©
Dick Cheney
Henry Kissinger
John N. Mitchell ©
Also-Rans:
John Kelly
Caspar Weinberger
Mick Mulvaney
Tom Price
Ben Carson
Rick Perry
Ryan Zinke
Richard Kleindienst ©
H.R. Haldeman ©
Spiro Agnew ©
I’d never heard of the following guy. Googling didn’t suggest he was more loathsome than many Attorneys General; unless a strong case is made against him I’ll drop him from future lists.
A. Mitchell Palmer
Shit, we’re including Veeps? Let’s get Darth Cheney on the board.
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He was my choice. He didn’t believe in conservation or preserving the environment, because Jesus will be coming back any day now.
He also refused to grant the Beach Boys the Capitol Mall to hold a concert because they were a bad influence.
As honorable mention, I was going to mention Michael D. Brown, the G.W.Bush-appointed director of FEMA who totally dropped the ball during Hurricane Katrina – but then I realized that not only was he not a cabinet-level secretary, he was also merely incompetent, not corrupt.
But Browny did a hell of a job.
Since a lot of the good ones are already taken, I’ll nominate W’s A.G., Alberto Gonzales.
Ed Meese. Edwin Meese - Wikipedia
Kissinger? That doesn’t make sense, it’s fine to disagree with him but he was certainly qualified.
OP specified “loathsome, corrupt and/or worthless.” Kissinger hits the first category out of the park.
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And here I thought I would seem so smart for nominating James G. Watt.
How about Anne Gorsuch Burford? She was an Administrator of the EPA under Reagan and is the very essence of what Scott Pruitt aspires to. She was also the first cabinet member in history to be cited for contempt of Congress. And if she wasn’t bad enough herself, her spawn, Neil Gorsuch, occupies the stolen seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
With the sole exception of A. M. Palmer—who doesn’t belong in this select company IMO and, anyway, is condemned for anti-leftist actions—every single nominee was appointed by a Republican President.
We’d better nominate a Democrat before the Tu Quoque Babies start whining. But I’m going to preemptively overrule Robert McNamara, who has atoned for any misdeeds with thorough and sincere explanation and apology.
DeVos is a moron, not a monster. Now Dick Cheney? He’s a monster. He was the undisputed driving force behind the immoral and illegal invasion of Iraq, making him ultimately responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. I mean, the guy literally has no heart! Compared to him DeVos is a modern day Florence Nightingale.
The best I can come up with in living me ory was Luther Hodges, the pro-segregationist Secretary of Commerce under Lyndon Johnson. There were some people under Clinton who were questionable in their ethics, such as Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin who as much as anyone contributed to the deregulation of the banking industry that led to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and a lot of incompetence (or ineffectualness, anyway) under Carter, but nothing like the bald avarice under Nixon and the attempts to dismantle (not just redice waste or spending, bit literally undermine) departments under Reagan, and of course everyone involved in the Iraq War under George W. Bush. Even with Johnson and the Vietnam War, most of his senior advisors were privately counseling him against widening the conflcit. I don’t think this necessarily reflects the moral or ethical superiority of the Democratic Party, which has been rife with corruption, albeit mostly on state and local levels, and served as home to the Dixiecrat contingent until the late ‘Sixties, but theor successful presidential candidates haven’t packed the senior executive branch with flagrant assholes in the way Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushs did. But nobody beats Trump for the breadth and and depravity of his Cabinet picks, the best of whom was arguably an oil tycoon whom he consistently undermined any sincere if bumbling efforts at the job.
DeVos has never spoken publically about her religious convictions bit the DeVos family is well known in Michigan for their neo-segregationist and fundamentalist Christian beliefs including the literal coming of the biblical Apocalypse. How much she is in agreement with her in-laws on theology is publically unknown but her actions as Education Secretary are consistent with the segregationist contingent, and she is inarguably an idiot who is wholly inexperienced to be the Secretary of Education and likely holds extreme views on religious matters.
Cheney is, of course, a contemptible excuse for a human being who was one of the principles behind engaging the United States in a pointless and destructive war over evidence he almost certainly know to be fabricated but that doesn’t detract from the awfulness of DeVos or most other current cabinet secretaries.
Stranger
Another vote for Watt. I was gratified to see him appear so early in the thread.