https://www.washingtonpost.com/clim...spain-floods-valencia-criminal-investigation/ Tragic flood, but some of the lost lives may have been saved if there were competent people in important positions. One of the key people in the emergency notification chain was a crony lawyer buddy who had no experience in such matters. To some degree we saw this with Katrina at the federal level, but local and state level incompetence was a big factor too. Seems to me with all that is going on here with Trump gutting the government and putting idiots in key position - something like this IS going to happen. Could be a natural disaster, could be a pandemic, could be terrorism or a military failure. Don’t be surprised when it does happen.
I think on some level, you don't necessarily need to be steeped in knowledge to head up a bureaucracy. If you can manage people and learn things on the fly, you can succeed even without a background in whatever agency you are heading. But a lot of "business mindset" now is just an obsession with efficiency and optimization, which tends to play out by simply getting rid of people, generally people with institutional knowledge who know how to do things and bringing in people who work for less money and have less experience (and usually a smaller workforce). And of course, any bureaucracy that deals with emergency management is going to appear functional when it has nothing to do, it can only really be tested when the worst happens. Given how closely these things track with job performance of politicians, its amazing that so many tempt fate with "heck of a job, Brownie" hires.
Although it happened in Spain it could very happen here considering that Trump is following the same playbook as the Spanish regional president and one a much larger scale placing loyalty above competence in the selection of officials responsible for disaster preparation and response.
