30 October—The U.S. Senate remote video hearing on approving Donald Trump’s surgeon general has been postponed because Trump’s celebrity nominee, Dr. Casey Means, went into labor Thursday morning. Parturient labor, of course. God forbid any nominee of Trump’s should belong to the proletariat.

Trump wants Dr. Means to take over the surgeon general’s job—not a cabinet office, by the way—from acting surgeon general Denise Hinton, a nurse and scientist whom he appointed on the first day of his second term, when he found time between all the questionable executive orders he was excreting. She has retired, presumably of her own volition.

Trump must have known about Dr. Means being in the family way when he tapped her for a job for which she may be more qualified than many people are willing to admit. (Just because Trump wants her in the job doesn’t eo ipso mean she’s not qualified for it.) Of course, it didn’t hurt that Casey Means, like Trump, is a Bobby Kennedy Jr. admirer.

Nor did it hurt that Casey’s older brother, Calley, also is a Bobby Kennedy Jr. admirer. Evidently it was Calley’s admiration for Bobby Jr., which Trump shares with him, that got him to see the light and renounce his earlier (and clearly misguided) never Trumpism. Add to that Calley’s conservative and unregistered lobbyist credentials. Moreover, he’s a special government employee with the Department of Health and Human Services, which happens to be under the diabolically charlatanic thumb of Bobby Kennedy Jr.

On the off chance you’ve never heard of special government employees, an SGE is an alleged advisor or consultant who is appointed—supposedly for expertise and supposedly on a temporary basis—to work with the federal government, as defined in Title 18 of the United States Code. SGEs may be paid or do their special things as volunteers. Unless non-volunteer SGEs work is deemed essential, they’re not being paid during the shutdown.

Elon Musk and his thralls and collaborators in the dreaded Department of Government Efficiency were and many still are paid SGEs. DOGE is itself a temporary bureaucracy, scheduled to bite the dust on 4 July 2026. It’s actually the repurposed and rechristened United States Digital Service, which had been established by executive action—as opposed to executive order—by President Barack Obama in 2014 “to deliver better government services to the American people through technology and design.”

That allegedly remains part of DOGE’s remit in addition to the better known one of cutting costs, though you wouldn’t know it . . .