Читать книгу Understanding a New Presidency in the Age of Trump - Joseph A. Pika - Страница 8

Since 1937, when Inauguration Day moved from March to January, presidents have had just three months to pivot from full-time campaigning to full-time governing. As Stephen Hess once put it, this pivot involves a focus on the “three Ps”: personnel, process, and policy.⁸ One of the first orders of business for a newly elected president is to select personnel. This step involves picking not only his most trusted advisers, including the White House staff, but also nominees to fill the top Cabinet positions and a wide range of departmental slots. In addition to the fifteen Cabinet secretaries and seven others often denoted as “Cabinet-level” (such as the budget director), there are more than five hundred other executive branch positions that require Senate confirmation. Thousands of others serve at the president’s discretion but do not go through the Senate. In all, some nine thousand jobs in the executive branch are listed and described in the so-called Plum Book, published every four years by the Government Printing Office to advertise jobs in the new administration.⁹ Before filling these myriad positions, potential candidates must be systematically recruited and thoroughly vetted.

Selecting personnel gets a great deal of media attention, but process is just as important. Process refers to decisions about how the incoming president will organize his White House. Does he want a highly centralized staff structure with a chief of staff empowered to act as a gatekeeper, or a more decentralized—or even competitive—advising process? Are there existing White House units he wants to abolish or new entities he wants to create? How will his staff relate to the Cabinet and other government units like the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff? Such decisions may not get much publicity, but they can profoundly influence the effectiveness of the decision-making process in the new administration.¹⁰

Photo 2 Vice President –Elect Mike Pence, who headed the Trump administration transition team, waves at reporters as he enters Manhattan’s Trump Tower on November 17, 2016.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Finally, the president-elect and his team must begin to craft a policy agenda for the new administration. Given the complexity of modern-day government and the magnitude of the issues it confronts, this task is very complicated. Moreover, establishing a policy agenda is only half of the puzzle. The transition team must also be thinking about how to implement it, which brings the discussion back to process. How will Congress, interest groups, and the public react to the policy proposals? In what order should they be introduced? Who should draft their specific language? How should they be promoted?

To deal with all of these issues, a transition team must be poised and ready to spring into action as soon as the election is over. Both Trump and Clinton put transition teams into place months before Election Day, groups that typically consult with figures who served in the last administration controlled by their own party for lessons on how best to proceed. Trump initially tapped New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to lead this effort, but three days after the election Trump booted Christie and replaced him with Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Clay Johnson, who ran the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under President George W. Bush and advised the Trump transition team, said that the shift from Christie to Pence wiped out months of work and meant that the operation to select personnel started over from scratch after the election: “They started out at ground zero, without a playbook and no recommendations.”¹¹

Since passage of the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has offered significant support to both the incoming and outgoing administrations. Upon request, it provides services and facilities to the President-elect and, prior to the election, to other eligible candidates.¹² The Trump transition team began taking advantage of that space in Washington, DC, almost immediately after the election, but Trump opted to use his own properties—Trump Tower in Manhattan, which housed both his personal residence and the offices of the Trump Organization, Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and his Mar-a-Lago estate and golf club in Palm Beach, Florida—for most of the high profile work of the transition. The locations proved convenient for Trump—indeed, he would frequent them during the early months of his presidency too—but led some critics to allege that he chose them to advertise his properties.¹³ Providing security at these locations also proved to be expensive. New York City alone had to foot a bill of $25.7 million to protect Trump Tower between Election Day and the Inauguration, a cost that federal taxpayers ultimately covered when Congress agreed to reimburse New York and other localities that protected Trump during the transition.¹⁴

Trump did move relatively quickly to identify his key advisers and initial Cabinet nominees. Just five days after the election, he named Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus as White House Chief of Staff and former Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon as White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor. He then announced his first Cabinet pick—Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), an early campaign supporter, as Attorney General—just one week after Election Day. By contrast, Bill Clinton, who ran a notoriously bumpy transition in 1992, did not name his White House Chief of Staff until mid-December and did not announce his first Cabinet pick until over a month after the election.

However, Trump’s relative speed in announcing senior nominees masked the fact that his transition team had done little and in some cases no advance vetting of those he selected.¹⁵ By contrast, Barack Obama’s 2008 transition team had begun vetting potential nominees before the election even took place, as did Hillary Clinton’s transition team in 2016.¹⁶ The Trump transition team’s failure to do this meant that the time-consuming process of gathering documents for background checks and financial disclosure requirements delayed the confirmation process for some nominees. Vetting derailed the process altogether for others, notably Trump’s nominee as Labor Secretary, Andrew Puzder.¹⁷ Puzder eventually withdrew from consideration after revelations about his business practices and personal life eroded support for his confirmation even among Republicans. Two days before Puzder withdrew, Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser after less than a month on the job amid controversy over his contacts with the Russian government. Proper vetting earlier on might have avoided those embarrassments.¹⁸

The Trump transition team largely ignored another important aspect of personnel: sub-Cabinet appointments. In all, more than 550 positions that the new president is expected to fill require Senate confirmation. By the end of his first hundred days in office, all fifteen of Trump’s nominees to fill the Cabinet had been confirmed by the Senate (the last, Alex Acosta to be Secretary of Labor, on the ninety-ninth day), as had six of the seven other Cabinet-level appointments that require Senate confirmation (with the seventh, the U.S. Trade Representative, being sworn in on May 15). But the president had not yet even nominated 465 of the other executive-branch posts requiring Senate confirmation.¹⁹ Thorough vetting of these nominees also proved to be a problem.

Well into the summer of 2017, hundreds of key jobs remained unfilled, stymieing the work of departments and agencies. (Most of the State Department’s top thirty-eight appointed positions remained empty, for example.²⁰) Perhaps compounding the problem, the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, the unit that oversees the selection process for presidential appointments, had a much smaller staff than its predecessors in previous administrations, with fewer than forty employees compared to more than one hundred under Bill Clinton.²¹ By the end of July 2017, only fifty nominees total had been confirmed, in contrast to the more than 225 at the same point in the Obama administration in 2009.²² Although Trump publicly claimed that he purposely left many of the posts unfilled because “they’re unnecessary to have,” evidence suggested that the vacancies had more to do with a chaotic and under-staffed selection process that, when Trump became president, appeared to be excessively micromanaged by warring factions within the White House.²³

Those warring factions reflected Trump’s preferred management style. In business, Trump liked to establish competing power centers with conflicting points of view, and he wanted to bring that style to the White House. Thus, during the transition, Trump embraced a “team of rivals” approach to staffing his inner circle of advisors, with Chief of Staff Priebus and Chief Strategist Bannon epitomizing the competing camps.²⁴ He appointed Kellyanne Conway, his third and final campaign manager, as another Counselor to the President. But he also surrounded himself with family, naming his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a former real estate developer and newspaper owner with no experience in government, as Senior Advisor, and his daughter Ivanka (Kushner’s wife), a former fashion model and Trump Organization executive, as Assistant to the President. Rather than giving his chief of staff seniority over the other advisors, Trump initially gave equal access and authority to Priebus and Bannon, and provided many others as well with “walk in” privileges (that is, the ability to speak to the president in the Oval Office without making an appointment). Many believed Kushner, with his family connection, to be—as Kushner himself reportedly claimed—“first among equals.”²⁵ Certainly he occupied an advantageous position to sway the president.

Photo 3 Counselor to the President Steve Bannon and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, the most prominent early symbols of Trump’s “team of rivals” approach to staffing.

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Some presidents have used a “team of rivals” approach to great effect. Franklin Roosevelt, for example, used competition among his staff to extract the best possible range of policy options.²⁶ But for a president like Trump, with no government experience and an apparent lack of interest in the specifics of policy, the approach proved far less productive—at least in the early months of his administration. From his first day in office, the media focused on the power struggle among his senior advisors,²⁷ with political observers noting that Trump thrived on chaos.²⁸ Within a month, however, the chaos came to be described as a problem.²⁹ Although apparently intended on Trump’s part, the process he embraced arguably made enacting policy more difficult and led to a variety of self-inflicted wounds, with the warring camps often leaking damaging information on their rivals to the media.

Policy remained the wild card during the Trump transition. Unlike Hillary Clinton, a policy wonk who surrounded herself with policy advisors and working groups, Trump’s presidential campaign had avoided developing substantive white papers; his specific policy stances on many issues were still a mystery after his election.³⁰ Observers looked at his appointments for clues. While his attorney general and homeland security secretary backed away from civil rights measures and ramped up enforcement of immigration law, as promised in the campaign, the “team of rivals” approach added little clarity in most policy areas. Even into the early weeks of his administration, Trump governed as he had campaigned, with little interest in the specifics of his legislative proposals and a willingness to reverse course on his broad-brush pronouncements. He deemed NATO a “bulwark of international peace” after months of calling it “obsolete,” authorized U.S. military intervention in Syria after years of opposing it, declared that China was not a currency manipulator after repeatedly railing against China for currency manipulation, expressed a willingness to renegotiate NAFTA after promising to withdraw from it on “Day One,” and abruptly fired FBI director James Comey for (as the White House initially claimed) mishandling the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server after praising him for the way he handled that investigation during the campaign.³¹ Legislatively, he backed a House measure repealing the Affordable Care Act that undercut a variety of his campaign pledges on the topic, then called the bill “mean,” then proceeded to support even more stringent versions in the Senate.³² As Trump told reporters in April 2017, “I like to think of myself as a very flexible person. I don’t have to have one specific way,” adding that particularly with regard to foreign policy, “I don’t like to say where I’m going and what I’m doing.”³³

In short, the transition and early months of the Trump administration fell short of the ideal launch of a new presidency by falling short on appointments, by embracing an advising process that did not seem to help the president get the information he needed, and by failing to articulate clear policy directions on many issues. Both of Trump’s predecessors came to office under much more difficult external conditions: Bush after a contested election that was not decided until December, and Obama in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and while fighting two wars abroad. Nonetheless, the nonpartisan White House Transition Project concluded that the Trump vetting process lagged behind previous administrations, contributing to the slowest performance in overall nominations and confirmations of any president in the last fifty years.³⁴ The lack of support in the agencies, in turn, made it harder for the new administration to draw upon the wider executive branch for substantive advice or specific policy proposals.