There is a concept in institutional design called regulatory capture, and if you have not encountered it, I would gently direct you to the work of George Stigler, who won the Nobel Prize in 1982 for explaining, with considerable patience, what happens when the entity being regulated comes to control the regulator. I mention this because President Trump has just nominated Dennis Kirk, a co-author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto, to serve as inspector general of the Interior Department, the office tasked with investigating the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool disaster, a $16 million boondoggle that Trump personally oversaw, personally defended, and personally blamed on imaginary vandals.
Mike Pennington (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsLet me walk you through the architecture of this, because the details matter and they are, frankly, exhausting.
Christian Brown (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsThe Reflecting Pool renovation was supposed to cost $2 million. It cost $16 million. Contracts were handed out on a no-bid basis without the required permissions. When the pool was refilled in June, the liner peeled off and floated to the surface, and the water turned green with algae, fed in part by a $1.7 million ozone nanobubbler that had never been tested in standing water. This is not a partisan characterization. These are the facts that emerged, in court filings, from the office of Jeanine Pirro, Trump’s own U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who dropped charges against four people arrested for allegedly vandalizing the pool and admitted that poor workmanship was the actual cause.
Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsTrump responded by calling Pirro someone who “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum insisted on social media that vandals were responsible, a claim that platform moderators promptly annotated with a correction. Trump then claimed, without evidence, that “86 47” graffiti at the scene was a coded assassination threat inspired by James Comey. This is, to use the technical term, a cascade of institutional failure, and the proper response is an independent investigation.
Instead, the investigation will be overseen by a man who helped write the playbook for expanding executive power and purging uncooperative civil servants. Kirk served at the Office of Personnel Management in Trump’s first term and more recently worked as an adviser to Tulsi Gabbard while simultaneously employed