Ben Carson on His Vexing Reign at HUD: Brain Surgery Was Easier Than This

[DonViejo]

By GLENN THRUSH MARCH 5, 2018

WASHINGTON — Before Ben Carson accepted President Trump’s offer to become secretary of housing and urban development, a friend implored him to turn down the job to preserve the reputation he had earned as a brilliant neurosurgeon and lost, in part, as a politician.

The confidant, Logan Delany Jr., who was the treasurer of Mr. Carson’s 2016 presidential campaign, described HUD as a “swamp” of “corruption.” He predicted in an email that Mr. Carson’s “lack of a background in housing” would make him prey to the department’s career staff and political appointees, as well as predatory lobbyists.

To drive home the point, Mr. Delany appended a link to an obituary of Samuel R. Pierce Jr., the Reagan-era HUD secretary whose reputation as a trailblazing black corporate lawyer was tarnished by accusations that he steered contracts to Republican cronies.

Mr. Delany’s most dire prediction has not materialized. But many of the other problems outlined in the memo have come to pass during Mr. Carson’s first year running a sprawling $47 billion-a-year community development bureaucracy that provides rental subsidies for about five million families and oversees people living in 1.2 million units of public housing. And Mr. Carson’s own lapses in judgment — combined with the questionable behavior of his family and his reluctance to aggressively engage Mr. Trump — have left him at the margins of the cabinet.

Mr. Carson, people close to him said, has been whipsawed by a job he has found puzzling and frustrating — so much so that he considered quitting during recent wrangling over the department’s budget.

more
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/us/ben-carson-hud.html?emc=edit_th_180305&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=574352840305

[dalton99a]

1. Ethical leadership is so difficult

[SWBTATTReg]

2. tRUMP's incompetence begats incompetence everywhere...

This guy is a liar through and through. He's isn't a billionaire, he's in debt up to his ears (or, the Russians have paid it all off), and pays no taxes what-so-ever. He's simply a fraud.

Carson is an idiot, by the way.

[exboyfil]

3. I don't understand why people

think skills transfer between disciplines. I give an example - I think it was Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins were discussing both cosmology and evolution. It was painfully obvious that each was unfamiliar with the other's field (it might have been different experts but you get the point).

I think the situation is particularly bad for focused specialists. Those are the ones who get rewarded by their respective organizations, but the generalists get penalized in academia.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. Unfortunately, the business world model is that if you can run one business

you can run any other one. I think that's essentially taught in business school. At least when I was taking business class several decades ago that was the clear message.

No, all business are not alike. So someone who was good at, say, running plants that manufacture cars starts thinking, How hard can it be to operate a steam-ship line? Or a department store? There's simply no understanding of how vastly different those industries are.

When a new field is just being invented and built up, the first generation of owners and managers were there at the beginning, understood what it was all about, and for the most part they did a good job of running their companies. But when they passed from the scene, those who took over may not have ever worked the shop floor, for instance, but have come in at the executive level. The growth of business degrees only made things worse.

Take a look at the airline industry. When I went to work as a ticket agent in 1969, all of the carriers were still being run by the men who had founded them or the ones who'd been hired not long after. At least one had started as a ramp agent, loading and unloading airplanes and was now the CEO. By the mid-1970s they first generation were retiring, and MBAs came on board, and that's when a lot of things started going downhill. Deregulation didn't help, of course, but the largest problem, in my opinion, was that people in the offices far removed from the day-to-day realities of the airport were making decisions that they didn't have to work with themselves.

Each business has its own specific set of problems and issues, and the skills needed to deal with those are specific to that kind of business. Which isn't to say a good person can't learn a new field, but just to march in and take over?

Running a huge bureaucracy like HUD can have nothing in common with being a good brain surgeon. Or even a crappy brain surgeon, because what it takes to become a doctor has zero to do with being an administrator.

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. This telling comment backs you up 100%:

“I think you have to come to the job with a sense of what the duties and responsibilities are,”
“If you don’t come with that sense, and the doctor didn’t, it doesn’t matter what your intentions are, you aren’t going to succeed. We are seeing that now.”

as in...no shit. And that is true of many of the other appointees, they have no clue what the job is about.

[KG]

5. you'd think a guy supposedly as 'brilliant' as carson would recognized tokenism when he was the

token

[riversedge]

6. @Joy--Hearing replacements for Hope Hicks and Ben Carson moving into the on deck circle...

Joy Reid
‏Verified account @JoyAnnReid

Hearing replacements for Hope Hicks and Ben Carson moving into the on deck circle...

Link to tweet

Replying to @JoyAnnReid @TomiBaird

Oh, I have no doubt they will be replaced by someone every bit as despicable, if not, more so.
1 reply 3 retweets 8 likes
ALASKA RESISTANCE
📎
‏ @TomiBaird
14h14 hours ago

I bet you're right. #MuellerIsComing
0 replies 1 retweet 2 likes

End of conversation

New conversation
NewJeffCT
‏ @NewJeffCT
15h15 hours ago

Replying to @JoyAnnReid

"on deck" - do you mean the deck of the Titanic?
6 replies 5 retweets 255 likes
Greenthumbs
‏ @JungGrasshoppa
15h15 hours ago

Bwahahaha!

[riversedge]

7. @HUD Ben Carson is 6th member of Trumps Cabinet to face ethics investigation

Ben Carson is 6th member of Trump’s Cabinet to face ethics investigation


https://shareblue.com/ben-carson-trumps-cabinet-ethics-investigation/
By
Matthew Chapman -
February 20, 2018
13141


Ethics violations are a hallmark of the Trump administration.

Trump administration officials just seem incapable of staying out of trouble.

On Tuesday evening, CNN reported that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson is under investigation by the department’s Office of the Inspector General for improperly giving his family members roles in government work.

Carson himself “called earlier this month for the inspector general to ‘review’ the role his family has played at the department after The Washington Post reported that HUD officials expressed ethics concerns about their role,” CNN notes. Carson’s son and daughter-in-law had helped organize a “listening tour” for the department in 2017.

And in the Trump administration, Carson is far from alone in flouting ethical norms and standards. In fact, he’s the sixth Cabinet-level official to face an inspector general investigation.

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price resigned amid an investigation into his use of private jets, at roughly $1 million in taxpayer expense.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has also enjoyed questionable private jet travel, has been probed for possible illegal campaign activity..........................