You’re hired? White House moves slowly to fill top jobs
Six months after he was elected, President Trump is indulging in the “you’re fired” part of the job, most egregiously by dismissing FBI Director James Comey and other officials investigating Trump associates. The “you’re hired” part? Not so much.
So far, Trump has filled fewer than 5% of 556 key executive branch positions, well below other incoming presidents and an underperformance that goes to core competence.
At 10 of 15 Cabinet departments, the only senior position filled is the secretary’s post. In five of those agencies — Agriculture, Education, Energy, Labor and the Department of Veterans Affairs — no one has even been nominated for a key senior executive job beyond the secretary.
The White House makes it sound as if things are running normally. “There is a method to this,” spokesman Sean Spicer said Monday about the persistent vacancies. “We are well on pace with respect to many of these.”
Every new president faces a vast sea of responsibility in this area: 4,000 political appointments across a bureaucracy of roughly 2 million workers, of which about 1,200 require Senate approval. “I look at some of the jobs, and it’s people over people over people,” Trump complained to Fox & Friends. “I say, ‘What do all these people do?’ ”
Layers of federal appointees do go three or four deep, and that doesn’t count the legions of politically appointed senior advisers, special assistants, deputy chiefs of staff and senior counsels. There’s certainly room to streamline the bureaucracy, and the administration has taken steps aimed at improving government efficiency and services.
That’s all well and good, but for the administration to conduct such a deep dive, it needs policy people at least in the top tier of management to understand what to cut and what to save.
Even Cabinet secretaries such as Ryan Zinke at Interior and Elaine Chao at Transportation are starting to complain about the delays. Most of the open slots are temporarily staffed by senior career employees, but their interim status diminishes their effectiveness and, as career people, they might be less inclined to make tough decisions.
The VA, with an annual budget of nearly $180 billion and 365,000 employees serving millions of veterans, is a priority for Trump. Yet it has no deputy secretary, undersecretaries for health and benefits, or CFO.
These kinds of vacancies matter to average Americans when VA disability ratings are delayed or no one answers the suicide hotline. And citizens will take notice as foreign hot spots multiply while dozens of senior State Department positions and ambassadorships stay vacant.
One stumbling block has been Trump’s focus on loyalty. When Zinke complained about vacancies, according to Axios, Trump told him he’d get his people “as long as they’re our people.”
Millions of voters chose Donald Trump, in part, because they hoped he’d focus his business acumen on big government. To do that, he needs the right people in the right places. Instead, he seems to be creating vacancies faster than he’s filling them.