Burn it all down

I would have expected nothing less.  It's the same for all US agencies he's put someone in. 

David Malpass, a veteran of two previous Republican Party administrations as well as a former chief economist for the now-defunct investment bank Bear Stearns, has been nominated to serve as undersecretary of Treasury for international affairs. It’s a critical crisis management role in the federal government, and one that Malpass certainly has the broad résumé for.

But despite decent paper credentials, Malpass has a striking track record of poor judgment about major economic issues over the past decade — cheerleading the economy on the verge of the Great Recession while warning of a collapse just as recovery was getting underway.

In August 2007 [...] Malpass, then of Bear Stearns, [penned] a reassuring Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Don’t Panic About the Credit Market,” urging the Federal Reserve and other policymakers not to overreact.

[...]

You don’t get a financial crisis without a lot of people at a lot of banks making a lot of mistakes, but Malpass stood out from the crowd by aggressively telling everyone to calm down while his own employer was actually on the bleeding edge of the disaster.

[...]

The good news about Malpass is that in contrast to many of Trump’s other high-profile appointees, he is qualified in a conventional sense. He served as a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury under James Baker when Ronald Reagan was president, and when Baker shifted to become George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, Malpass came along as a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department. He did a stint as the GOP’s staff director on the Joint Economic Committee in Congress, and served on a congressional blue-ribbon panel on tax scoring in 2002-’03.

[...]

Which is a good thing, since neither Trump nor Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin nor National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn have any experience in government on any level, and they may find that it’s useful to have someone on hand who knows what the government does.

  Vox

They won't find it useful at all. They don't care about the country. Their concerns are purely self-serving.

This is where we get back to the part where Malpass was chief economist at a soon-to-be-bankrupt investment bank, telling a country teetering on the brink of disaster that everything was okay.

The fact that he was utterly wrong didn’t stop him from trying again. In 2011, he popped back up with another Wall Street Journal op-ed urging the government to implement a policy of higher interest rates. Malpass said higher rates would lead to a stronger dollar and bigger economic growth. This is, to say the least, not how the majority of economists think this works. In 2012, Malpass warned that rejecting his advice was going to lead to a recession in 2013.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. Instead, the Fed kept interest rates low, leading to years of continuous job growth, which, in turn, led to a gradual strengthening of the dollar.

[...]

A perhaps optimistic view would be that Malpass was being deliberately biased in his past forecasts — trying to boost the fortunes of GOP politics as an outside propagandist while as a senior member of the Treasury team he’ll be boosting their fortunes by offering sound advice.

A bleaker view, however, would be that Malpass is a die-hard true believer who couldn’t contemplate the possibility that the low taxes and light regulation of the Bush years could be compatible with a catastrophic financial crisis.

Either way spells disaster for the country.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.