The necessary and ongoing flurry of Senate confirmations of cabinet posts serves to remind us the executive branch is about more than just the issuing of executive orders. Concerning which, as a brief aside: as much as many of us (I among them) who may lament the reductionism and centripetalization inherent in governing by executive order, it is useful to be reminded no president has even distantly approached the number of EOs signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who signed — get this — 3,721. Woodrow Wilson came in a distant second with 1,800 or so. For perspective’s sake, George W. Bush signed 13 during his two terms, Barack Obama 34, Donald Trump 39 in his first go-round, and Joe Biden 52.

But back to the cabinet. Most are going through with relatively little fanfare, whether they are ideologically despised or not, as is proper — the president is the president, after all, and generally deserves the cabinet he wants. Pete Hegseth for Defense was an outlier, for several reasons, some valid, some silly. Steve Feinberg, Trump’s pick for Deputy SecDef, at least has experience running a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, something Hegseth lacks and was the biggest legitimate strike against him. With Hegseth’s on-the-ground military experience, the two may just form the right complement to do the job.

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The other nominations garnering media attention and facing serious doubts about successful confirmation are a little peculiar — and I mean not just their respective personalities. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and Tulsi Gabbard, up for Health and Human Services and Director of National Intelligence respectively, are both erstwhile Democrats who bring with them some left-of-center perspectives. It is more than a little surreal watching progressive senators attempt to attack both for adherence to policies and principles on which they had in the not-so-recent past been entirely in sympathy with. Watching Elizabeth Warren, for instance, go after Kennedy for suing drug companies was priceless.

The other big one, which seems to be far more under the radar than the Kennedy hearing, is Gabbard. One wonders what President Trump might have thought when he was looking about for someone to be the titular head of America’s intelligence services and settled his eyes on — Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard’s entire public history concerning national intelligence has been a mix of antagonistic and bizarre. She has long been a vocal opponent of the section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which allows the United States to listen in on communications of non-Americans, located outside the country, who are deemed a threat. That is a supremely useful ability if we want to know if, say, someone is planning to blow up an airplane or a port.

There is also the bit about her, to put it euphemistically, ill-advised jaunt to sit down with Syria’s mini-Hitler Bashar al-Assad in 2017, a three-hour meeting from which she emerged absolutely convinced there was no way her new BFF could possibly have used chemical weapons, gushing on the dictator as some do about Taylor Swift.

But perhaps her worst transgression, the one which ought to disqualify her categorically from the post she seeks, is her support for Edward Snowden, the traitor who leaked a treasure trove of American national secrets to reporters. Snowden’s actions are particularly odious, not only because he willingly betrayed a solemn trust afforded by the position he held, but in the fact his first subsequent thought was to run into the arms of America’s most powerful strategic adversary at the time, Russia. The civil libertarian argument about him being a hero for privacy is poppycock — a 2016 House Intelligence Committee review put that rumor to bed revealing the documents he leaked “instead pertain to military, defense and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries.” The United Kingdom’s MI6 wound up having to pull field officers out of several locations because the secrets Snowden leaked put their lives in danger. It was perhaps the worst thing to happen to America’s intelligence posture since Sen. Frank Church made a foreign aid program out of America’s secrets in 1975, prompting Britain to curtail their cooperation with the CIA for several years.

Yet Gabbard co-sponsored a House Resolution in 2020 to drop all federal charges against Mr. Snowden. And in her Senate confirmation hearing, she refused to label Snowden a traitor, an equivocation that, to his credit, Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet forcefully called her out for. National intelligence in a free country is an odd balancing act, the aims of democracy — that the people should know everything — and the aims of espionage — nobody should know anything unless they need to — are inherently at odds. It is a unique area of government which requires a surfeit of good judgement. Everything in Gabbard’s past indicates her judgement is at best questionable. If President Trump wants to reward her loyalty, surely, he can find a spot in which her left-wing disdain for the hard realities of America’s secret services can do no harm.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.