Bill Wood: Some of Trump’s choices make sense, but Carson atop HUD?

President elect Donald Trump is making selections for his leadership team. He selected Dr. Ben Carson as the head of HUD. Housing and Urban Development is a huge bureaucracy that, for a leader who understands HUD, still has to cope with getting a bunch of bureaucrats to do something like what the leadership wants. Dr. Carson, a retired surgeon, has no background in HUD and, even more important, no experience in managing a huge organization.

I expected he would be selected as Surgeon General. There he would have been able to use his bully pulpit to attack all manner of serious health concerns. On the other hand Trump selected former governor of Texas Rick Perry to head the Department of Energy. Perry has a history with DoE; it was one department he said he would close, but he could not remember it in the presidential debate in November, 2011. That ended his Presidential hopes. The President Elect has pledged to drain the swamp so putting Perry in charge of a department he sort of wanted to close is good. Jimmy Carter established DoE to insure enough gasoline so we never have another failure as happened in late 1970s. It, like Carter, was a failure.

This story was originally published December 19, 2016 at 6:51 PM with the headline "Bill Wood: Some of Trump’s choices make sense, but Carson atop HUD?."