The Third BrickWhat Good Government Actually Requires — Part Three
There is a tradition in American politics so embedded that most people never question it.
The president wins. The president hands out cabinet positions. The cabinet positions go to the people who helped the president win — donors, allies, loyalists, true believers, and occasionally someone who spent the entire campaign calling for the department they now run to be abolished.
We call this governing.
It isn’t.
It is the thank you gift system dressed up as executive leadership. Party favors with confirmation hearings. And while career civil servants generally do the actual work underneath the political appointees, the damage happens when the unqualified person at the top starts making policy. Policy driven not by expertise or national interest but by the ideology, ego, or donor relationships of someone who got the job because they made the right phone calls at the right time.
The confirmation process was supposed to prevent the worst of this. In theory Congress evaluates the nominee and decides whether they are qualified to lead a critical department. In practice — as we have watched in painful real time — partisan confirmation is theater. When the system is controlled by one party the hearings become a formality and the outcome is predetermined regardless of qualification.
So here is the question the third brick asks.
What if the president didn’t pick the cabinet?
Not entirely. Not unilaterally. What if the senior positions in critical departments — Defense, State, Justice, Intelligence, the Federal Reserve — were filled by professionals who advanced through their own institutional ranks on merit, competence, and demonstrated performance? The way military officers advance. The way career diplomats advance. The way the civil service was designed to work before political appointees started parachuting in over the people who actually know the job.
The president would then work within that professional framework to accomplish the agenda the voters elected them to execute.
Which brings us to the vice president.
Right now the vice president is chosen to win a state, appeal to a demographic, or balance a ticket geographically. They are an electoral calculation wearing the costume of a governing partner. Your running mate is whoever helps you win. What happens after winning is a separate conversation.
What if it wasn’t?
What if the vice president was required to be a genuine working partner — someone who shared the governing agenda, complemented the president’s specific weaknesses, and was capable of actually running the country if called upon? Not a campaign asset. A co-architect.
That changes everything downstream.
A president who has to pick a genuine partner picks differently than a president assembling an electoral coalition. A ticket built around a shared agenda attracts a cabinet built around executing that agenda. If the country faces a climate crisis the executive team running on clean energy solutions has the expertise and the congressional backing to address it. If national security is the crisis the team built around genuine military and diplomatic competence has the credibility to lead.
There would still be infighting. There will always be infighting. Human nature doesn’t get reformed by better institutional design.
But more handshakes and less backstabbing is not a naive hope. It is what happens when you change the incentive structure. Right now the incentive is loyalty to one person. Change the incentive to competence in service of a shared agenda and the culture follows the incentive.
The military figured this out. You do not hand the Joint Chiefs to someone’s campaign donor. You advance through the ranks, demonstrate competence at every level, and earn the position. The fact that this system was recently dismantled in favor of loyalty appointments is not an argument against the system. It is the strongest possible argument for protecting it with something more durable than institutional habit and assumed good faith.
Professional advancement. Merit confirmation. A vice president who is a partner not a prop. A cabinet built to execute an agenda rather than reward the people who funded it.
