President-elect Donald Trump shocked many observers when he tapped Betsy DeVos to
head the Department of Education.
DeVos
quickly accepted the nomination, which continues a trend that officials
involved in previous transition teams say is concerning because, like many of
Trump’s other early picks, she has no previous experience in government.
“When
we were in the Obama transition, one of the big concerns we had that there were
a lot of people coming into government who did not necessarily have federal
government experience,” said Norman Eisen, a former ambassador who worked on
President Barack Obama’s White
House transition team in 2008. “The Trump transition has that problem on
steroids.”
Indeed,
Trump’s roster of key White House advisers and cabinet officials could, in the
end, rank among the least experienced in recent presidential history.
Steve Bannon,
Trump’s chief strategist, headed right-wing news site Breitbart News before chairing the
president-elect’s campaign. Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, previously ran the
Republican National Committee. And Trump’s son-in-lawJared Kushner, a key presidential campaign strategist who is now
being discussed as a White House adviser, ran his family’s real estate business
before entering politics.
None
of those individuals has worked in government.
In
addition, Trump tapped South
Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R)
Wednesday to be his United Nations Ambassador. She has little, if any, official
foreign policy experience.
To
Trump, who pledged to “drain the swamp” of the nation’s capital, and his
allies, this may be a key selling point of his picks. To Eisen, who now works
at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, D.C., it points to
potential problems ― both in the development of policy and in terms of simple
governance.
“Government
is like any other profession ― it requires expertise,” Eisen told The
Huffington Post. “I don’t think you’d want that gang, if they had a similar
lack of expertise in surgery, operating on you with that level of comparable of
medical experience. And the same is true in government.”
While
DeVos has never worked in a school or agency that dealt directly with education
policy, she has served as the chair of the Michigan Republican Party and headed
organizations that focus on education reform.
By
contrast, Dr. Ben Carson. ― Trump’s preferred
choice to head the
Department of Housing and Urban Development ― has no identifiable expertise in
housing policy. And he’s never served in government, let alone atop a federal
agency. Carson himself has worried that his lack of experience could
potentially “cripple the
presidency” if Trump tapped him to serve in the cabinet, his senior
adviser admitted.
“Unlike
Betsy DeVos who at least has some experience with the issue, I think Carson’s
experience with the sorts of things that HUD does is very, very top down ― to
put it gently. Housing is a very complicated issue for example,” said William
Galston, who was previously a policy adviser to former President Bill Clinton. He
now heads governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
Galston
suggested that inexperienced cabinet appointees would likely select more
seasoned deputies. He likened it to the chief executive of a company having a
chief operating officer with greater knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the
business’s operations.
“Frankly,
I’m more concerned about what people stand for than I am about their lack of
experience,” Galston said. “My assumption is that unless people are really
stupid, if they want to move an agenda, then they will pick senior deputies who
know how to move agendas through the machinery of government.”
Galston
raised concerns, however, about the outsize role that Trump loyalists and
family members were likely to play in the incoming administration.
“When
you bring in so many friends and family into your inner circle that can easily
create a circle the wagons phenomenon,” he said. “That can have the effect of
slowing or even discouraging the free flow of information on which every
president depends. The last thing any president needs is a palace full of
courtiers.”
Other Trump choices are raising
eyebrows for reasons other than experience. Trump’s pick for national security
adviser, Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, served as director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency for two years. But Flynn was fired in 2014, in part because
of concerns over his management style, which one former Pentagon official
called “disruptive.”
A
figure close to the Trump transition team said he’s concerned about this
nomination, because being national security adviser requires a diplomatic style
that appears lacking in Flynn.
“What’s
worrisome is that the NSC job is a traffic cop job. He should be coordinating
policy, not dictating it. Imagine how this will go: Mattis (who outranked Flynn
and whom everyone seems to like) disagrees with Flynn. Does Flynn then scream
at him or spend time undermining him? Same with Secretary of State Romney,”
said the source, referencing Trump’s consideration of former Gen. James
Mattis for Secretary of Defense and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R)
for the top diplomat post.
“And
when it come time to brief Trump how does Flynn handle a situation where all of
the cabinet is unified and Trump disagrees?” the adviser added.
Jay
Lefkowitz, who advised former President George W. Bush on
domestic policy and later served as the administration’s special human rights
envoy to North Korea, was less concerned about the relative inexperience of
Trump’s selections thus far.
Lefkowitz
noted that DeVos’ lack of federal government experience made her the ideal pick
for an agency “in desperate need of reform.”
“There
is a little bit of institutional knowledge ― how things actually work. It
actually helps to have been through this a little bit,” Lefkowitz said. “There
are some really good people who have been in the White House before and been on
the Hill before who I hope he takes a look at.”
“On
the other hand, one of his appeals was that he was going to break away from
conventional politics and conventional bureaucrats,” Lefkowitz added.
From
this perspective, having fresh faces in key posts, he concluded, is “a net
positive, not a net negative.”
But
Eisen, who noted that Trump is himself inexperienced, as the first president-elect
who hasn’t served either in the government or the military, isn’t convinced.
“You
have either no experience or the wrong kind of experience,” he said. “That
starts at the top, and it’s very troubling.”
Culled from Huffingtonpost
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