Are Cabinet conflicts coming?
Trump’s promises don’t jibe with advisers’ positions
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump promotes himself as a man divorced from party ideology, a presidentelect just as open minded to input from Al Gore as Newt Gingrich.
But with his Cabinet nearly complete, he has chosen one of the most consistently conservative domestic policy teams in modern history, setting himself up for hard decisions and potential conflict with some of his supporters when he begins to govern.
The internal conflicts have emerged with nearly every pick.
Trump campaigned against the big banks, then chose a former Goldman Sachs partner, Steven Mnuchin, to run his Treasury department. He pledged to save Medicare and Social Security, then chose Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, who has advocated sweeping revisions in Medicare and Medicaid, to run Health and Human Services.
On the campaign trail, Trump put the burdens of working people at the top of his agenda, yet chose as Labor secretary an executive, Andrew Puzder, who has talked about the advantages of replacing human workers with machines because they are “always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case.”
And even as Trump aides put out word that the president-elect’s oldest daughter, Ivanka, would be an influential administration voice in favor of curbing global warming, Trump named a man who has repeatedly expressed skepticism about the scientific consensus on climate change, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.
“This is a big mystery to a lot of people, and it’s going to be one of the hardest things about this presidency,” said Elaine Kamarck, a former adviser in the Clinton administration now at Washington’s Brookings Institution, who has written about the inner workings of White Houses.
Trump has so far shown a deftness at drawing attention away from sticky policy debates with attentiongrabbing strokes, a tactic that may help him deflect controversies when he moves to the Oval Office.
He defied some ideologues in his party, and won good will from many supporters, by persuading Carrier to keep a portion of the air-conditioning company’s manufacturing jobs in Indiana rather than ship them to Mexico.
Despite criticism over singling out an individual company with tax incentives and implicit threats to its government contracting business, Trump was able to use the publicity over the deal to promote a message that workers, particularly those in manufacturing, were at the top of his agenda.
“We are going to see a lot of symbolic politics,” said Lara Brown, a professor of political management at George Washington University. She expects gestures like the Carrier deal to prove effective for some time.
Trump’s supporters, Brown said, are more invested in shaking up the system than a particular policy agenda.
But the splashy moves could wear thin if Trump fails to deliver on signature promises, like a jobs boom.
“People will give him the benefit of the doubt for a while, but if things have not become different for them by this time next year, they are going to get restless,” she said.
Trump has sent conflicting signals about how much direct control he will exert over federal agencies.
Transition officials say Trump will be calling all the shots and giving clear direction. Yet Trump has never demonstrated a sustained interest in policy details. By contrast, at least some of his appointees will take office with detailed agendas they have honed for years as well as ties to lawmakers who know the workings of the federal government in much more detail than the president-elect.
A survey that the nonpartisan Pew Research center released last week suggests voters remain uncertain of Trump’s agenda. Just 4 in 10 Americans, fewer than any president-elect since Pew began asking the question during the 1989 transition, approve of the job Trump has done in explaining his plans and policies, the survey found.
Trump’s Cabinet picks also won approval from only 4 in 10 Americans, another low for a presidentelect during the transition.
Kamarck said Cabinet secretaries normally seek guidance on day to day decisions by looking to presidents’ prior government actions and their campaign policy papers — two things Trump lacks. In the absence of clear guidance, they may interpret their selection as a mandate to pursue their own agendas. That could lead to conflict if those policies prove unpopular or at odds with Trump’s desires.
She pointed to failures in two Democratic administrations — Bill Clinton’s effort to allow gays to serve openly in the military and Barack Obama’s desire to close Guantanamo — as examples of the difficulties that can ensue when presidents have public disagreements with the people in charge of implementing their policy goals.