President-elect Donald Trump shocked many observers when he tapped Betsy DeVos to head the Department of Education.
DeVos quickly accepted the nomination, which continues a trend that
officials involved in previous transition teams say is concerning
because, like many of Trump’s other early picks, she has no previous
experience in government.
“When we were in the Obama transition, one of the big concerns we had
that there were a lot of people coming into government who did not
necessarily have federal government experience,” said Norman Eisen, a
former ambassador who worked on President
Barack Obama’s White House transition team in 2008. “The Trump transition has that problem on steroids.”
Indeed, Trump’s roster of key White House advisers and Cabinet
officials could, in the end, rank among the least experienced in recent
presidential history.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, headed right-wing news site Breitbart News before chairing the president-elect’s campaign. Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, previously ran the Republican National Committee. And Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner,
a key presidential campaign strategist who is now being discussed as a
White House adviser, ran his family’s real estate business before
entering politics.
None of those individuals has worked in government.
In addition, Trump
tapped South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) Wednesday to be his United Nations Ambassador. She has little, if any, official foreign policy experience.
To Trump, who pledged to “drain the swamp” of the nation’s capital,
and his allies, this may be a key selling point of his picks. To Eisen,
who now works at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington,
D.C., it points to potential problems ― both in the development of
policy and in terms of simple governance.
Government is like any other profession ― it requires expertise.
Norman Eisen, former Obama transition adviser
“Government is like any
other profession ― it requires expertise,” Eisen told The Huffington
Post. “I don’t think you’d want that gang, if they had a similar lack of
expertise in surgery, operating on you with that level of comparable
medical experience. And the same is true in government.”
While DeVos has never worked in a school or agency that dealt
directly with education policy, she has served as the chair of the
Michigan Republican Party and headed organizations that focus on
education reform.
By contrast, Dr.
Ben Carson. ―
Trump’s preferred choice
to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development ― has no
identifiable expertise in housing policy. And he’s never served in
government, let alone atop a federal agency. Carson himself has worried
that his lack of experience could potentially “
cripple the presidency” if Trump tapped him to serve in the Cabinet, his senior adviser admitted.
“Unlike Betsy DeVos who at least has some experience with the issue, I
think Carson’s experience with the sorts of things that HUD does is
very, very top down ― to put it gently. Housing is a very complicated
issue for example,” said William Galston, who was previously a policy
adviser to former President
Bill Clinton. He now heads governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
Galston suggested that inexperienced Cabinet appointees would likely
select more seasoned deputies. He likened it to the chief executive of a
company having a chief operating officer with greater knowledge of the
nuts and bolts of the business’s operations.
“Frankly, I’m more concerned about what people stand for than I am
about their lack of experience,” Galston said. “My assumption is that
unless people are really stupid, if they want to move an agenda, then
they will pick senior deputies who know how to move agendas through the
machinery of government.”
Galston raised concerns, however, about the outsize role that Trump
loyalists and family members were likely to play in the incoming
administration.
“When you bring in so many friends and family into your inner circle
that can easily create a circle the wagons phenomenon,” he said. “That
can have the effect of slowing or even discouraging the free flow of
information on which every president depends. The last thing any
president needs is a palace full of courtiers.”
Other Trump choices are raising
eyebrows for reasons other than experience. Trump’s pick for national
security adviser, Retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, served as director of the
Defense Intelligence Agency for two years. But Flynn was fired in 2014,
in part because of concerns over his management style, which one former
Pentagon official called “disruptive.”
A figure close to the Trump transition team said he’s concerned about
this nomination, because being national security adviser requires a
diplomatic style that appears lacking in Flynn.
“What’s worrisome is that the NSC job is a traffic cop job. He should
be coordinating policy, not dictating it. Imagine how this will go:
Mattis (who outranked Flynn and whom everyone seems to like) disagrees
with Flynn. Does Flynn then scream at him or spend time undermining him?
Same with Secretary of State Romney,” said the source, referencing
Trump’s consideration of former Gen. James Mattis for Secretary of
Defense and former Massachusetts Gov.
Mitt Romney (R) for the top diplomat post.
“And when it come time to brief Trump how does Flynn handle a
situation where all of the Cabinet is unified and Trump disagrees?” the
adviser added.
Jay Lefkowitz, who advised former President
George W. Bush on
domestic policy and later served as the administration’s special human
rights envoy to North Korea, was less concerned about the relative
inexperience of Trump’s selections thus far.
Lefkowitz noted that DeVos’ lack of federal government experience
made her the ideal pick for an agency “in desperate need of reform.”
“There is a little bit of institutional knowledge ― how things
actually work. It actually helps to have been through this a little
bit,” Lefkowitz said. “There are some really good people who have been
in the White House before and been on the Hill before who I hope he
takes a look at.”
“On the other hand, one of his appeals was that he was going to break
away from conventional politics and conventional bureaucrats,”
Lefkowitz added.
From this perspective, having fresh faces in key posts, he concluded, is “a net positive, not a net negative.”
But Eisen, who noted that Trump is himself inexperienced, as the
first president-elect who hasn’t served either in the government or the
military, isn’t convinced.
“You have either no experience or the wrong kind of experience,” he said. “That starts at the top, and it’s very troubling.”
How smart are U.S. presidents?
According to a survey by the Conference Board, a global market
research firm, most of today’s employees in the workplace dislike their
jobs. In addition, a survey conducted by Right Management, a division of
Manpower, illustrated that 60% of employees intend to leave their jobs
when the economy improves. It’s no secret that the majority of today’s
employees are unmotivated and disengaged in the workplace and their
disengagement according the Gallup organization costs employers roughly
$300 billion annually.
