The question was never whether Jared Kushner is effective. He is, extraordinarily so. The question is what his effectiveness costs, and whether we want to make it the template.

He gets things done. He takes a cut. He cuts corners. And it is genuinely unclear what statutory authority he had to do any of it. That last part is the point.

He gets things done. The FIRST STEP Act: he drove the largest criminal justice reform in a generation through a skeptical White House; thousands of inmates earned reduced sentences. The Abraham Accords: Israel’s normalization deals with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco, the first in decades. COVID: Project Airbridge airlifted some 746 million gloves and 71 million masks in weeks; his DPA push got GM building 30,000 ventilators; on the Warp Speed board, its chief scientist said Kushner shielded the science from election politics. Vaccines were authorized that December. Few officials in either party have a record like that.

He takes a cut. In sworn 2019 testimony (Pittard v. Al Thani), Alan Bender said Qatari officials told him Qatar funneled $1.4 billion through Brookfield to bail out Kushner’s failing 666 Fifth Avenue, because direct payment was “too risky,” and that Kushner told Doha: “You pay what I tell you to pay, or I unleash my dogs.” Secondhand but sworn; never tested in court. While he ran the COVID response, Kushner-linked firms took up to $6 million in PPP loans. His brother’s firm built the government testing website that was scrapped.

He cuts corners. His parallel COVID task force of inexperienced volunteers prioritized supply tips from Trump allies on a “VIP Update” spreadsheet; few panned out. His team’s tip led New York to hand $86 million to an engineer who delivered zero ventilators. The national testing plan his team built “went poof”; Vanity Fair’s sources said politics killed it, the White House denied it. His “our stockpile, not the states’” doctrine left governors bidding against each other.

The authority problem. How does an unelected 36-year-old with no government experience run foreign policy and a pandemic supply chain? A 2017 Justice Department opinion reversed prior rulings to exempt White House staff from the anti-nepotism law. As a mere “adviser,” he needed no Senate confirmation, no hearing, no vote. Career officials denied his top-secret clearance over foreign-influence and financial concerns; the president overruled them. Every check the system has, confirmation, vetting, clearance, was routed around rather than passed through.

So here is the precedent question. Do we want a system where effectiveness is the only credential? Where the president’s family can conduct diplomacy, run disaster response, and steer billions, with no confirmation and a family business on the side, because the results were good? The next president will have a family too. That is the part nobody seems to be thinking about.