To the victor’s friends, the spoils
Trump awards posts to allies, campaign help
One appointee went from “battleground states” director for the Trump presidential campaign to a role at the State Department that sent him to South Africa to meet with health officials.
Another traded in her campaign experience as a field director in Virginia for a federal job promoting nuclear energy sales abroad.
They are among the nearly 260 former Trump campaign and inauguration workers who have gotten jobs reserved for political appointees in the administration, according to public records compiled by ProPublica and analyzed by The New York Times.
In all, more than 2,475 political appointees have joined the federal government since President Donald Trump took office, including at least 187 former lobbyists and also 125 people with ties to conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, records show.
A database of the employees, assembled through hundreds of open-records requests, has been posted online by ProPublica.
Handing out political jobs to former campaign workers, likeminded experts, lawyers and erstwhile lobbyists is a grand tradition in Washington, where, to the victor, go the spoils.
“Overall, my reading is that the Trump political appointees have less expertise in their respective areas than any presidential administration dating back to at least the Reagan era,” said Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who reviewed the database.
Lindsay Walters, deputy White House press secretary, said the administration had appointed well-qualified staff.
“The president selects the highest caliber of individuals from an array of backgrounds and experiences to fill positions in his administration,” she said in a statement. “
One of the top sources of the appointees has been the presidential campaign, according to the database. Some of the people listed in the database have already left the Trump administration, but it offers a snapshot of those hired for political jobs in the past year. At the White House alone, there have been almost 60 former campaign workers. In addition, about 20 have been hired at the Energy Department, and another 20 or so at the Commerce Department.
Some of the Commerce jobs have been filled with people who have extensive experience in government or the private sector.
At the State Department, political appointees include Taylor Bush, whose title is listed as special assistant.
Bush was a field director for the campaign in Fairfax, Va., and also worked on the inaugural committee and at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The only other recent source of income listed on his financial disclosure form was a bartending job at the Hamilton Restaurant in Washington.
The administration has granted at least 31 waivers to some former lobbyists and others who had private-sector jobs that overlap with their new federal assignments, according to the database.
Among them is Erik Baptist, a senior deputy general counsel at the Environmental Protection Agency. He previously worked for the American Petroleum Institute as a lobbyist on federal regulations related to renewable fuels.
The appointees from conservative research and advocacy groups reflect Trump’s rightleaning politics.
The Heritage Foundation tops the list, according to the ProPublica tally, with at least 25 former employees now working for the administration.
Next is Freedom Partners, a nonprofit group led by the general counsel of Koch Industries, with 16 people who were compensated by the organization.
They are among about 35 Trump political appointees who worked for or consulted with different groups affiliated with the billionaire libertarian brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch.