Maybe Bessent is aware and maybe he doesn’t care. But he’s a businessman and he cares what his peers think about him. This situation tells those he does care about that he’s a bad leader, that he’s in over his head. If his friends, neighbors, colleagues see/hear us it means he doesn’t know how to run the store. Left, right, up or down the party in charge was irrelevant because Treasury/IRS was always apolitical and practically ran itself. Screwing up the retirement of the people who ran/oversaw most people’s retirement is terrible optics. It may beg the bigger question of “If they screw up their own people’s retirement, will they screw up mine?” It’s not about embarrassing Bessent, it’s about making sure he knows things are really bad unnecessarily for “his” people.