Trump's empty administrationAs presumptive nominee takes first steps on transition, GOP policy veterans say they're not interested.
By DARREN SAMUELSOHN and BEN WHITE 05/09/16 05:21 AM EDT Updated 05/09/16 01:32 PM EDT
Top Republican political leaders aren’t the only ones shunning their party’s presidential nominee — a vast number of highly skilled managers and policy experts, veterans of recent GOP administrations who would normally be expected to fill key positions for a new White House, are also vowing to sit out a Donald Trump presidency.
And while the failure of the two Presidents Bush or House Speaker Paul Ryan to endorse the presumptive nominee carries political consequences, the absence of policy veterans in a new administration would have a substantive effect on the running of government.
Politico interviewed nearly five dozen Republicans over the past two weeks — people with experience working in government and who understand how Congress can enact, or shred, a new president’s agenda — and heard the same sentiment expressed repeatedly. If Trump doesn’t change his tune or extend much longer olive branches, many of these government veterans say they intend to cede highly coveted administration posts to less-experienced competitors.
“I would never serve in a Trump administration,” said James Capretta, a former Office of Management and Budget official under George W. Bush. “The person at the top is unfit for the presidency. He’s made that very clear with his behavior.”
Added Matt McDonald, another Bush OMB veteran: “I wouldn’t vote for Trump, much less work for him. I don’t agree with half his ideas, and the other half I don’t really believe what he said.”
One former Republican official who worked in the Environmental Protection Agency put it this way: “You’d have to worry about your future career and the way you’re perceived in these things. You just kind of think of how he deals with people. Would you really want to work for him?”
The lack of interest in serving Trump extends from the energy and financial services sectors to defense and foreign policy. And while the reluctance of former officials to join a Trump administration may spark a good-riddance response from the candidate himself, the absence of experienced professionals at the assistant-secretary level could have profound consequences on the government.
“The bottom line is Trump will be able to fill these jobs because there is a whole class of people who want these titles so badly it doesn’t matter who is president,” said a former senior George W. Bush administration official. “But these are B- or C-level people. They are honorable, but not very good. The A-level people, and there are not that many of them to begin with, mostly don’t want to work for Trump. He will cut the A-level bench of available policy talent at least in half, if not more.”
Building an administration from scratch requires filling more than 3,000 high-level federal jobs, starting with a Cabinet and trickling down to the scores of deputies, undersecretaries and assistant administrators who actually make the U.S. government tick.
It’s a herculean task for any new president, but would, perhaps, especially be so for Trump, who has taken anti-Washington campaigning to new heights.
This makes Trump’s challenge of uniting the Republican Party urgent — and difficult. The current and former lawmakers, former GOP administration officials, policy experts and presidential transition veterans who spoke with Politico agreed that Trump will need to display a much more serious level of policy understanding and statesmanship over the next six months to demonstrate he’s the kind of boss they would really want to work for.
As he’s cemented his role as the GOP’s presumptive nominee, Trump has taken initial steps toward building an administration: On Monday, he installed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie as chairman of a transition team “that will be prepared to take over the White House when we win in November.” The Christie move came after the New York Times reported on Friday that Trump had asked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to start transition planning with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and senior adviser Paul Manafort.
Several Republican issue experts confirmed they’ve also recently started helping the campaign build out its knowledge base and outreach to the party’s policy experts, working in tandem with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the first senator to endorse Trump. For example, John Mashburn, a former chief of staff to Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C), just started with the Trump campaign as policy director, joining longtime Sessions aide Stephen Miller, another senior policy adviser.
But Trump’s initial steps to get ready to govern don’t compare with where Republicans were four years ago on the transition front. By the late spring of 2012, Mitt Romney was already starting to vet possible Cabinet members, as well as people willing to serve in other senior political slots. Even Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush in the early stages of the 2016 race were collecting the names of potential administration hires.
On Friday, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that launches his end of the transition process, including briefings on certain issues for the presidential candidates. It’s a move that follows up on a law he signed in March that requires a sitting administration to begin planning the hand-over to a new administration six months before the November election.
Former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, whose personal advocacy on the transition planning issue led Congress to name the new law in part after him, wrote in an email that this year’s presidential nominees must start planning, too, given there are less than 75 days between the election and inauguration.
“This is not a political thing,” said Leavitt, who handled Romney’s 2012 transition planning and served under George W. Bush as an EPA administrator and also secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services. “It’s a serious obligation.”
A source familiar with Trump’s thinking explained that the billionaire businessman was reluctant to add new layers of policy experts now, feeling it would only muddy his populist message that has been hyperfocused on illegal immigration, trade and fighting Islamic extremists.
“He doesn’t want to waste time on policy and thinks it would make him less effective on the stump,” the Trump source said. “It won’t be until after he is elected but before he’s inaugurated that he will figure out exactly what he is going to do and who he is going to try to hire.”
Trump said as much in a recent interview with The New York Times, telling the newspaper he is thinking about his potential appointments to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and secretaries of Defense and Treasury. “But I think more about winning first,” he said.
As he considers who he’d want on his team, the Manhattan billionaire has spoken about following in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln by tapping some of his 2016 Republican rivals — from Christie and Ben Carson to Marco Rubio and John Kasich — as Cabinet members, or even for a running mate.
But even people who have been mentioned by the candidate himself as potential hires are reluctant to engage in a discussion of whether they would want to serve in his administration.
Rubio, for example, sidestepped several questions in late April about life in a possible Trump administration, either for himself or any other Republicans. “I’ve not thought about it and I don’t have a thoughtful answer,” he told Politico. “I just haven’t spent any time thinking about what you’re asking me.”
At Treasury, which plays a lead role on fiscal and tax policy, the only candidate regularly mentioned by Trump is long-time Wall Street activist investor Carl Icahn. But the 80-year-old Icahn has repeatedly said he doesn’t want the job. And few who follow these jobs closely think Trump would even try to persuade him.
“You can’t send an 80-year-old Wall Street guy to be Treasury secretary,” one top former Republican White House official said. “It’s not going to be Carl Icahn. You can have an old Wall Street guy as trade representative or at Commerce or something but not Treasury. It doesn’t work.”
Trump could still look to Wall Street for a Treasury secretary, perhaps from the private equity industry. A name often mentioned to replace Jack Lew is Blackstone Group Chief Executive Stephen Schwarzman; a person close to Schwarzman described him as a “great choice” for Trump. Trump has also mentioned KKR co-founder and co-CEO Henry Kravis as a possible Treasury secretary. But Kravis, 72, has said he’s not interested.
Trump also name-dropped former GE CEO Jack Welch, 80, for Treasury. Welch has also said he does not want the job. Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, who has worked extensively on financial issues including reforming the housing finance system, has also been mentioned for Treasury as well as for secretary of state.
One other name mentioned by several Republicans as a possible Trump Treasury secretary is Glenn Hubbard, currently dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. Hubbard served in top economic jobs in both Bush administrations. He advised Jeb Bush before the former Florida governor dropped out of the 2016 campaign.
Trump would certainly not be Hubbard’s first choice of presidents to serve, people who know him said. But he might agree if implored by Trump to help run economic policy including a big tax rewrite, Hubbard’s top issue. Hubbard did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s biggest challenge in attracting talent, however, is Trump himself, according to dozens of Republican policy specialists. The real estate billionaire has run a presidential campaign heavy on insults and devoid of the kinds of substantive policy ideas that GOP issue experts look to for signs of what they’d be working on if they joined his government.
“I think it would be very hard to help him,” said presidential historian Stephen Hess, a former aide to Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. “He of all the candidates I have ever known is the most profoundly ignorant of the presidency. I don’t know quite how you deal with that once you get to the point when you are supposed to be advising him.”
Sure enough, the same motivations behind the #NeverTrump movement that has been working to block the billionaire’s path to the GOP nomination also apply to many of the Republican policy wonks who have no plans to ever send Trump their résumés.
After Trump became the presumptive nominee with his victory in Indiana last Tuesday, Keith Hennessey, who led George W. Bush’s National Economic Council, turned to Twitter to repost a link to a recent blog post that declared his firm opposition, complete with a lengthy takedown of the billionaire’s evolving policy views.
“This is not a tough call,” Hennessey wrote in March. “Donald Trump is an ignorant, unprincipled, amoral policy lightweight opposed to free market capitalism and limited government.”
Trump’s personnel challenges also threaten to undermine some of the most ambitious parts of his agenda. Several officials who served in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department and at the Federal Reserve during the most recent GOP administration predicted a President Trump would have trouble attracting A-list talent to help him execute a plan to completely rewrite an uncompetitive U.S. corporate tax code while also addressing a national debt nearing $20 trillion.
“Not only will I not work for Trump, I’ll continue to use my voice to actively oppose him. Trump isn’t merely distasteful or wrong on policy — he’s a danger to the country,” said Tony Fratto, a former White House and Treasury official under George W. Bush. “He is truly monstrous. Anyone who thinks he’s going to ‘moderate’ or become reasonable once he achieves power is insane.”
Lanhee Chen, who served as Romney’s 2012 policy director and then took on a senior advising role with Rubio in 2016, declined to comment when asked about his willingness to serve under Trump. But he did admit that Trump faces an uphill climb attracting experienced talent.
“My view is it would be very challenging for a lot of mainstream policy folks to envision working in an administration for somebody who has said some of the things Trump has said during the campaign,” Chen said.
While other Republicans who might serve in senior economic and financial regulatory posts said they would have no interest in joining a Trump administration, some did concede they might take the chance in part out of a sense of duty to try and keep Trump from doing any real damage.
“I think over time he will be able to fill those jobs, but it will not be easy at the start,” said one senior Republican who has been mentioned for at least two Cabinet posts. “He will have to surround himself with people who know what they are doing. And in a way it may be a great opportunity for people who really want to make a difference, because he’s going to come in without a set of people already around him or any strong preconceived notions of what to do.”
Liza Wright, who ran the Bush White House’s personnel shop from 2005 to 2007, said she expects the number of Republican policy experts willing to work for Trump to grow if the party establishment rallies around him.
“I think personal ambition is going to overcome a lot of angst and principle over whether they fundamentally support Trump,” Wright said. “I’ve seen that a lot, where people want that bullet point on a résumé.”
But there’s still the question of whether Trump would want to surround himself with veterans of past administrations. The presumptive nominee is just as dismissive of recognized policy-area experts as they are of him.
During a foreign policy address last month in Washington, Trump signaled he had little interest in many of the Bush administration veterans who have been busy during the Obama era making money at law firms, on K Street and in academia since leaving their government jobs, many more than a decade ago.
“We have to look to new people because many of the old people frankly don’t know what they’re doing, even though they may look awfully good writing in The New York Times or being watched on television,” Trump said.
And certainly, if Trump takes over the White House in January 2017, he will hire enough people to keep agencies running. Indeed, as he shifts toward the general election and alters his GOP-primary-focused rhetoric, the party establishment’s animosity toward its standard-bearer could lessen.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that people will be sending résumés in,” said Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican and early Trump supporter on Capitol Hill who predicted the frenzy for administration jobs would kick in in earnest at the conclusion of the 2016 cycle. “Talking to people who know people, it will occur. Things change after the election.”
Some of the elected GOP officials who have endorsed the billionaire’s campaign said they would consider joining the administration, even if it meant leaving their Capitol Hill positions. California GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter, a former Marine officer in Afghanistan and Iraq, wouldn’t rule out working at a Trump-led Pentagon. “We’ll see,” he said in an interview. “I’m only 39.”
“Of course I’d be interested,” replied North Dakota Rep. Kevin Cramer, who endorsed Trump in April and was mentioned in a recent story in The Hill as a possible energy secretary. “Would I love to shape a team? Yes, I’d love to.”
George David Banks, a former George W. Bush environmental aide who served at the White House and State Department, also raised his hand signaling a willingness to serve his party’s presumptive nominee.
“I would be honored to work for a Trump White House,” he said, adding that he expected to see many of his GOP colleagues lobby for administration jobs if the Republican wins the general election. “But the real question is how many of them would Mr. Trump actually hire.”
Indeed, many of Trump’s allies insist he will have no problem finding enough people to work for him in government; the only question will be weeding out the predictable candidates and choosing the best people to do the job.
“There are people who make a career out of glomming on or latching on to whoever it is in power,” Hunter predicted. “Those people will try to latch on as soon as possible to whoever they think is going to win.”
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