Top 10 Worst Cabinet Members

One of New Mexico's two original Senators, Fall was appointed to head the Department of the Interior by poker buddy President Warren G. Harding. His tenure was a disaster. In 1922, he secretly granted an oil executive the exclusive right to drill on the Teapot Dome reserve in Wyoming. (He made a similar deal at a reserve in California.) As Senate investigations later revealed, his generosity was rewarded to the tune of more than $400,000. Though he retired in 1923, Fall's back-room deal later became a byword for government corruption, and in 1931, the former Interior Secretary left his home by ambulance to serve a one-year prison term— the first cabinet member ever convicted and imprisoned for a major crime committed while in office.