Not necessarily a nepo hire, but they are scraping the barrel.

Project 2025's playbook was to fire all the existing people in the federal government and replace them with Trump loyalists. To that end, they created a list of pre-vetted replacements.

Problem is, those people are vetted for loyalty first, and competence a distant second. Also, a lot of them likely have jobs already that are more lucrative than a federal position. In other cases, their circumstances change in the months in between vetting and the offer becoming concrete. So even though they may have a few thousand people on the list, a big chunk of them aren't going to accept when the time comes. Those that do aren't necessarily going to be qualified in any way.

What may be surprising here is that they're scraping the bottom so quickly. You'd think out of several thousand possibilities, they could find someone more qualified than this guy.

This tends to be destructive in the short term, because incompetent people are making important decisions. In the long term, it's one of the self-defeating factors of fascism. A system just can't work this way, but it can destroy the rest of society before it implodes on itself.