South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Biden rooting out Trump loyalists
New staffers have their work cut out for them in rebuild
WASHINGTON — When President Joe Biden swore in a batch of recruits for his new administration in a teleconferenced ceremony last month, it looked like the country’s biggest Zoom call.
Biden was installing roughly 1,000 high-level officials in about a quarter of all of the available political appointee jobs in the federal government.
At the same time, a far less visible transition was taking place: the quiet dismissal of holdovers from the Trump administration, who have been asked to clean out their offices immediately, whatever the eventual legal consequences.
If there has been a single defining feature of the first week of the Biden administration, it has been the blistering pace at which the new president has put his mark on what President Donald Trump dismissed as the hostile “Deep State” and tried so hard to dismantle.
From the Pentagon, where 20 senior officials were ready to move in days before the Senate confirmed Lloyd Austin as defense secretary, to the Voice of America, where the Trump-appointed leadership was replaced hours after the inauguration, the Biden team arrived in Washington not only with plans for each department and agency, but the spreadsheets detailing who would carry them out.
A replacement was even in the works for the president’s doctor: Dr. Sean P. Conley, who admitted to providing a rosy, no-bigdeal description of Trump’s COVID-19 symptoms last year, was told to pack his medical kit. While all presidents eventually bring in their own doctor, Biden wasted no time bringing back a retired Army colonel, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who was his doctor when he was vice president.
Biden had named nearly all of his Cabinet secretaries and their immediate deputies before he took office Jan. 20, most of them familiar faces from the Obama administration. But the president’s real grasp on the levers of power has come several layers down.
The National Security Council, for example, where U.S. foreign policy comes together, already has staff members in place for jobs that sometimes take months to fill. There is an Asia czar (Kurt Campbell, who served in President Barack Obama’s State Department), a China director and directors for other regions. There is a full homeland security staff and a new, expanded White House operation to oversee cyberoffense and defense.
The contrast with the
Trump administration at a similar point in time is striking
Trump had no experience in government — which he made a selling point in his 2016 campaign — and mistrusted those who did. He made it clear that he planned to shrink or starve some agencies, often before determining how to align their missions with the right number of personnel.
Many of Trump’s appointees — except at the Defense Department and at the Department of Veterans Affairs — arrived with instructions to cut, and it became a point of pride among Trump administration officials to leave jobs open. In the end, Trump did not shrink the federal workforce by much — except in places like the Education Department — but his determination to do so meant that many posts went unfilled for the first two years.
No place was that mission clearer than at the State Department, which Trump delighted in calling the “Deep State Department.”
The first secretary to arrive, Rex Tillerson, recalled last year that he spent months examining what he called the “lines of authority” inside the building and creating strategies to cut the department’s staff by 30% — time that might have been spent thinking about ways to develop policy toward China or Russia or anywhere else.
Congress blocked most of the cuts.
Today, the State Department is being run by Foreign Service officers and career officials who greeted the new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, when he arrived for his first full day of work Wednesday after being confirmed by the Senate.
Blinken grew up inside the department — he joined in 1993 — and served at the end of the Obama administration as its deputy secretary.
So far, there have been few appointments at State; Foreign and Civil Service officers have filled in. But Blinken plans to make some of those appointments permanent, going back to a previous era when career officials or retired foreign service officers take posts that in more recent times have been filled with political appointees.
At the National Security Council, the White House said in a statement, Biden has “nearly doubled the number of staff ready to start and onboarded than either Trump did in 2017 or Obama in 2009.”
The White House offered no specific numbers but said they reflected “the urgent need to build — in some cases rebuild — capabilities like climate, cyber, global health security and biodefense, and democracy from the ground up.”
The new staff members will have their work cut out for them.
“In making appointments as a new president, Biden has a much tougher job than Trump,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, who has written about many transitions. “It’s harder to rebuild a government than it is to ransack, demoralize and hollow a government out.”
But there has also been a lot of rooting out.
The tone was set before Biden was sworn in.
On the Saturday before the inauguration, Michael Ellis, a Trump loyalist, was installed as general counsel of the National Security Agency on the orders of Trump’s acting defense secretary. It was a classic case of “burrowing” a political appointee into the bureaucracy in a new, nonpolitical job classification that would make it hard to fire him.
But after Biden became president, Ellis was placed on administrative leave while the National Security Agency’s inspector general examined the circumstances of how he was chosen. Now it is unclear if Ellis will ever serve in the job.
At the Department of Health and Human Services, largely ignored by Trump, at least 18 new political appointees have taken up position, still a fraction of a department that is typically run by more than 100.
But one or two wellplaced allies can mean a decisive change of direction.
One key appointment is Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard University health economist and an alumnus of the department. He took a top role in the agency’s research office, which had been hijacked under Trump by political appointees who warped reports, webpages and planning documents, rooting out flattering references to the Affordable Care Act and inserting anti-abortion language.