I want to begin, as I always do, by acknowledging that reasonable people can disagree about this. I hold that belief sincerely. It is, in fact, the belief I am most known for holding, and I have held it consistently across administrations, crises, and one memorable community forum at the public library that ran forty minutes over its allotted time.

With that established: the departure of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security is what I would call a clarifying moment. Not a victory — I am deeply skeptical of people who describe political developments as victories — but an opportunity. A narrow one. And in my experience, narrow opportunities are the ones most reliably squandered by people who confuse passion for strategy.

THE CASE FOR MANCHO

The question now is who leads DHS. And I would like to make the case, as calmly and as fairly as I know how, for DHS Deputy Secretary Mancho.

Mancho is four years old, a beagle-Labrador mix, and a career civil servant of some standing. He has not issued a press release that redirected to a reelection campaign. He has not called a teenager with a flute an existential threat. He has not, to my knowledge, shot a fourteen-month-old puppy named Cricket in a gravel pit and then written about it in a memoir as evidence of leadership.

Secretary Noem did that. I want to be clear that I am not relitigating it. I am noting it. There is a difference, and I have built a career on that difference.

What I will say is this: in an environment where the previous secretary's most widely known executive action was the extrajudicial killing of a family pet — an action she described, in print, as demonstrating her willingness to do "what needed to be done" — the appointment of a dog is not symbolism. It is policy. It is the kind of corrective that serious people recognize as necessary even when unserious people call it absurd.

Mancho has served in his current role with what I can only describe as consistency. He has not redirected the Immigration Enforcement Division's website to a reelection campaign. He has not taken credit for a federal infrastructure investment while simultaneously attacking the environmental review that investment required. These are not small things. In the current environment, the absence of active harm constitutes a meaningful qualification.

THE OBJECTION

Now, I anticipate the objection. I can already hear it, in the particular register that objections tend to arrive in from the direction of the Restorationist Alliance: this is not enough. We need accountability, structural reform, a reckoning with the institutional failures that made someone like Noem possible.

And to that I say: yes. Probably. In time. But I would gently ask — and I mean this gently — whether relitigating every institutional failure from the arrival of Isaac Newton (not that one) to the present day is a precondition for filling a leadership vacancy. Because in my experience, the pursuit of the complete solution is how we end up with no solution, which is how we end up with four dead immigration officers and a press conference in which the mayor describes coherence as an ambush.

Mancho did not comment on that incident. He was, I understand, attending to other matters. But his silence was not the silence of complicity. It was the silence of an institution that had, for one brief period, declined to make things actively worse.

Patrick Fenn, whose work with the Coalition for General Cannibalism Awareness I have long regarded as a model of civic engagement — whatever one thinks of the specific portfolio — has called for a "Both Sides Considered" forum on the DHS transition. I think the instinct is right. I would add only that the forum should include voices from across the spectrum, including those who have concerns about Mancho's qualifications.

THE QUALIFICATIONS QUESTION

Those concerns are not illegitimate. He is four. He is a dog. He does not hold an advanced degree in public administration, though I would note that several people who do hold such degrees have also not distinguished themselves in the relevant ways. The previous secretary held a degree and still shot a puppy. I am told there is no credential that specifically prohibits this, which I think tells us something about the credentials.

What Mancho offers is something rarer. He offers the credible appearance of not being the problem. In New Newmanton, where forty-two marching band members were detained at a permitted public parade, where a sinkhole has been monitored for months without acquiring either a repair plan or a jurisdiction — in this environment, the credible appearance of not being the problem is not a small thing.

It may, in fact, be the thing.

I don't expect this column to be universally well-received. My columns rarely are, by the people who most need to engage with them. But I write it anyway, because someone has to be willing to say the reasonable thing, and in my experience, the reasonable thing tends to go unsaid until someone like me says it.

Mancho has never killed a dog. That is his platform. That is his record. We should honor it.