I’m not sure questioning their competence is a fair criticism, though.
Gaetz is a pretty competent guy, after all. No, he’s not competent at being a run-of-the-mill Congresscritter - drafting legislation and getting budget amendments into omnibus bills to support local constituent services and the like. But he’s an absolutely brutal political operative, and has been devastatingly effective at bending the arc of the House in the direction he wants it to go.
So he will be phenomenally ill-suited to accomplish the “external” goals of the DOJ - efficiently administering prosecutions and investigations and whatnot. But he might be astonishingly well-suited for a massive re-org of the Department. He’s good at “cuttin’ heads,” has shown he’s adept at achieving his goals under heavy criticism and attack, and is completely fearless in getting into conflicts with entrenched power.
I’ve been thinking of John J. Ray, III - the corporate lawyer and CEO who specializes in going into catastrophically failed companies like Enron and FTX and managing them through their collapse. He probably isn’t the best person to run an “ordinary” energy company or crypto/financial company. He’s good at performing a very specific type of management.
Gaetz and RFK, Jr. have the “superpower” of being completely and utterly indifferent to the criticism of other people, even very powerful people, in pursuit of their objectives. That’s a handicap if you’re looking for someone to run an agency in “ordinary” mode. But if you’re looking for someone to completely reorder how an agency does things, that’s actually a very core competency for that…