Price’s travel the least of his warts, but is he the worst?

Donald Trump has just voted in the Worst Cabinet Member contest.

“We’ll see,” he said when asked by reporters if he was going to fire Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. I believe I speak for us all when I say this does not sound like a vote of confidence.

Price recently became famous as the guy who enjoys traveling by private charter plane at the taxpayers’ expense.

Price is also the guy who is waging a war against birth control that’s cratering teen pregnancy prevention programs.

But in this administration you can ruin federal initiatives aimed at avoiding unwanted pregnancy, and Trump — no fan of unwanted pregnancy — will completely ignore it. If Price goes down, it will be over his travel bills, which is sort of like Al Capone going to jail for tax evasion.

Price claimed that a majority of the private charters he’d taken “were for the opioid crisis or the hurricanes.” No indication of whether it was a weather disaster or drug emergency that took him to the Aspen Ideas Festival in June. Still not quite as bad as attempting to cut $6 billion from next year’s National Institutes of Health research. Price is terrible, and whatever sends him out of government is fine.

Do you think he’s the Worst Cabinet Member? There’s so much competition. Consider Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

Policy-wise, Mnuchin is an awful Treasury secretary, unless you’d been hoping the post would go to someone whose strong point is a keen understanding of all the hopes and needs of the hedge fund industry.

Plus, there’s a plane thing! At one point Mnuchin tried to get a government jet to take him on his honeymoon. More recently, he used one to fly him and his wife to

Fort Knox.

The Trump Cabinet is worth trashing on so many important levels that it does seem unfair to judge the members simply on the basis of stupid moves of self-gratification. You would like to see the country denouncing Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, for having stripped his agency of scientists. (“Science is not something that should be just thrown about to try to dictate policy in Washington, D.C.”)

However, that seems to be working well for Pruitt in Trump Washington. So as a fallback, let’s encourage discussion of the $25,000 he’s spending to put a soundproof phone booth in his office.

Is there anybody in this Cabinet whom you can like? A Morning Consult/ Politico poll of registered voters found Defense Secretary James Mattis had the most support — although to be honest, none of Trump’s appointees exactly elicited enthusiasm. Mattis is frequently mentioned as a man standing between our president and Armageddon, so you could understand him being popular.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was at the bottom, presumably because a whole lot of people believe that she is trying to reorganize public education into a private venture.

DeVos, who also came in last in a readers poll I did a few months back, has been a particular foe of government attempts to crack down on for-profit colleges that cheat their students.

And on this one, we know that it’s the policies people don’t like. DeVos is so god-awful rich, she rides in private planes she pays for herself.