When McConnell blocked the confirmation of Garland to SCOTUS, he also blocked over a hundred federal bench appointments, so many, that the Federalist Society was struggling to find enough to fill the seats, so yes they were scraping the dregs at the bottom of the conservative barrel. So in only follows that a lot of conservative appointments were given a position above their level of competence.

Curiously, in movements like the white Christian nationalist movement that had been commandeering the GOP since the 1970s (which is not to say they were much better before that), the shift from principle to personal loyalty results in brain drain, since competent officers with dissenting opinions are swapped out for incompetent ideologists. The German Reich also had to deal with this kind of problem.