Small Government? This Is Ridiculous

Click here for an article by Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg entitled "The Empty Trump Administration."

Trump has to fill 690 positions that require Senate confirmation; with less than 48 hours to go until his inauguration, he has nominated 28.

As Berman reported, the Partnership for Public Service suggested a president should have "100 Senate-confirmed appointees in place on or around Inauguration Day." At this pace, he won't have 100 nominees by the end of February, let alone having them confirmed and hard at work.

Further, Bernstein says:

Look at the big four departments. There's no Trump appointee for any of the top State Department jobs below secretary nominee Rex Tillerson. No Trump appointee for any of the top Department of Defense jobs below retired general James Mattis. Treasury? Same story. Justice? It is one of two departments (along with, bizarrely, Commerce) where Trump has selected a deputy secretary. But no solicitor general, no one at civil rights, no one in the civil division, no one for the national security division.

And the same is true in department after department. Not to mention agencies without anyone at all nominated by the president-elect.

One area where this lack of staff could have particularly serious consequences is national security. Click here for an article at Politico by Michael Crowley, entitled " Is Trump ready for a national security crisis?" The subheading is "Personnel gaps across security and defense bodies has stoked concerns that the new administration could get caught flat-footed."



So will Trump's team be ready for a national security crisis in the first few days of the new administration?

"This isn't getting attention it deserves. Who will run and implement policy? Right now there is a big vacuum," Max Boot, a military historian and fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted Tuesday.

Crowley says:

“Unlike State, which can rely on its bureaucracy, the NSC has to be ready on Day One as most of its old team leaves,” said Philip Gordon, who held senior NSC jobs in the Obama and Clinton White Houses. “In a normal world, even before a single presidential phone call or meeting or decision the NSC team would prepare background, points, facts, etc. They will not have a team ready to do that.”

Susan Rice, Obama's National Security Adviser, has a team of 180 employees; they'll be gone on Friday.

Sources who have had contact with Trump’s national security transition team said it has been tight-lipped about its staffing. “Very few people really know anything about lower-level appointments,” said one person in the mix for a job. “Those who do know aren't talking, and those who are talking don't know anything.”

That has left Washington and foreign capitals unsure whether Trump’s team will be slow to materialize, or whether, as some GOP insiders suggest, appointments have been made but not announced.

Many national security veterans believe the former. “I know a huge number of people who are in limbo,” said one conservative foreign policy activist.

Another said that Trump aides are narrowing their list of candidates for key jobs, but that "there's an internal war over how to fill them and who gets them."

In Bernstein's article at Bloomberg, he considers the possible consequences of this failure to fill staff positions:

First of all, the government actually does things, and without all the jobs filled it's not apt to do them very well. Even if there's no catastrophic failure, lack of leadership will, as should be no surprise, yield inertia and low morale, leading to steadily worse performance.

When it comes to policy, Trump will be only a vague presence in the executive branch during the months when presidents normally have the best chance to get things done. It's not news to anyone that bureaucrats are skilled in resisting the preferences of presidents. But an entrenched bureaucracy against a secretary (and in most cases, a secretary with little government experience or little policy expertise or both) and a bunch of empty desks? That's no contest. Congress and interest groups may still have plenty of clout inside the departments and agencies, but Trump, at least until he has some people there, will have little.

He speculates about the reasons for this failure, and concludes:

If I had to guess, however, I'd say that the failure to get his administration up and running on time isn't a deliberate choice by Trump; he just has no idea what he's doing, and hasn't surrounded himself with people well-equipped to translate his impulses and his campaign commitments into a full-fledged government. This isn't exactly a surprise. Recall that the Trump Organization has never had a large bureaucracy and that his campaign didn't staff up the way campaigns normally do, so he doesn't really have any relevant management experience. And, of course, he's never demonstrated any significant knowledge in how the government actually works. The results are likely to be damaging to his presidency, and to the nation.