Kushner’s role no longer limitless
Presidential son-in-law is staying within the lanes established by chief of staff
At a senior staff meeting early in President Donald Trump’s tenure, Reince Priebus, then White House chief of staff, posed a simple question to Jared Kushner: What would his newly created Office of American Innovation do?
Kushner brushed him off, according to people privy to the exchange. Given that he and his top lieutenants were paid little or nothing, Kushner asked, “What do you care?” He emphasized his point with an expletive.
“OK,” Priebus replied. “You do whatever you want.”
Few in the opening days of the Trump administration dared to challenge Kushner’s power to design his job or steer the direction of the White House as he saw fit. But 10 months after being given free rein to tackle everything from the federal government’s outdated technology to peace in the Middle East, the do-whatever-you-want stage of Kushner’s tenure is over.
Kushner, the president’s son-inlaw and senior adviser has lately disappeared from public view and, according to some colleagues, taken on a more proscribed role behind the scenes. He is still forging ahead on a plan to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and he has been credited with focusing attention on the government’s technological needs.
‘Jared works for me’
But the new White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly, has proved less permissive than his predecessor. Kelly has made clear that Kushner must fit within a chain of command. “Jared works for me,” he has told associates.
He also said the Office of American Innovation, run by Kushner, had demonstrated its value, noting that he had recently sent some members of its team to Puerto Rico to report back on conditions on the hurricane-ravaged island.
And in an email forwarded by the White House, the president said Friday that he still relied on Kushner. “Jared is working very hard on peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and the last thing I would ever do is get in the way of that possibility,” Donald Trump said. “Jared has been very effective since the earliest days of the campaign, and the same is true today. He understood the movement then and has been helpful implementing the agenda the American people voted for since.”
Speculation about Kushner’s role comes as the long shadow of the special counsel’s investigation darkens the White House. Investigators have asked witnesses about Kushner’s foreign policy role during the campaign and the presidential transition, including his involvement in a debate over a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank, as The Wall Street Journal has reported.
One person familiar with the questioning, who asked not to be identified discussing the investigation, said the special counsel, Robert Mueller, appeared to be exploring Kushner’s role as part of his examination of Michael Flynn, who went on to become Trump’s national security adviser before being forced out after 24 days for not being forthcoming about his contacts with Russia’s ambassador. Change reflects successes
Even Kushner’s supporters acknowledged that his role had evolved. In their view, that reflected his success, not failure. By helping to push out Priebus and Stephen Bannon, the president’s chief strategist and acerbic nationalist infighter, they said, Kushner helped stabilize the White House, allowing him to focus on his own projects rather than feeling compelled to weigh in on so many different issues.
“Jared’s role working for President Trump is just as important as it was Day 1, only now he doesn’t have to worry about baby-sitting others,” said Jason Miller, a campaign adviser who remains close to the White House. “His focus was always supposed to be the president’s big-picture, long-term projects, and now Jared can work on those uninterrupted.”
Critics take a less generous view. Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist, said the “magical powers” ascribed to Kushner early on seemed to have faded. “As long as Jared was seen and not heard, he was able to play the role of wonder boy,” he said. “But now he is no longer seen, and we are only left to wonder about the boy whose father-in-law placed the hope of unraveling the world’s most intractable public policy puzzles from peace in the Middle East to reinventing government” in him.
Some initiatives backed by Kushner have proved more fruitful. Congress appears to be on the verge of creating a $500 million fund to help agencies modernize outdated information technology systems, some of which are at least 40 years old.
With Kushner’s support, the Department of Veterans Affairs also developed a plan to erase a long-standing electronic gap between the medical records of service members and veterans that has hurt patient care for years.
But Kushner’s push for technological advances is hobbled by a lack of permanent officials to carry out policy changes at the agency level. The innovation office is providing political cover and “a push from the top,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that analyzes the effectiveness of the government. “But at the end of the day, what the White House does doesn’t matter if it doesn’t get implemented at the agencies where the real action takes place.”