Let Trump Continue To Fail To Appoint People
Let Trump Continue To Fail To Appoint People
There has been much moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth by many commentators and politicians over the failure of President Donald Trump to appoint people to fill numerous now vacant positions within the executive branch of government, with the State Department often being put forward as one of many agencies with many empty chairs in official positions. However, the other night I heard Lawrence O’Donnell make an interesting point: those empty chairs are being filled in the meantime by long-in-place civil servants who actually know what they are doing and are not Trump-loving hacks and fools. In departments where he has made appointments, such as the EPA, his appointees have wreaked havoc and done mostly awful things.
So, let us hope that he gets bogged down in tweeting and blocking possible candidates for these positions because they are insufficiently kowtowing to him. That way we might have at least some parts of some government agencies run by non-crazy knowledgeable individuals. We can only hope.
Barkley Rosser
I agree.
I have been close enough to the pentagon machine that spreads around trillions of bucks on things like F-35 and V 22 (that is weapons acquisition which remain a “high risk” perennial GAO audit area for over a decade) to observe the OPM regulated civil servants are a little better than hacks and this observation goes back to early 1990’s.
In that puzzle palace the go along to get along miasma of generals and super grade civil servants continues without aid of any breed political appointees!
ilsm,
Well, since you note DOD specifically, I do note that there are weapons programs that the Pentagon has said it does not need or want, but that continue to be funded because politicians like the spending in their districts.
I have direct knowledge of one small “program” which was known to us to be political, and not really needed, that was a long time ago.
There have been dissenters and some get their message out.
The winners in the ‘palace games’ go along to get along+, and while some things are built for politicians a lot of missions are made up by the generals that make little sense, political or military.
It is a multi faceted puzzle palace on the Arlington side of the Potomac.
+some of them promise that “someday they will do the right thing”, but never happens.
Well, ilsm, I think the immediate question is whether or not these generals or admirals or whoever is sitting in these offices one step below the civilian appointees is better or worse than whom Trump might appoint. On this, I have little confidence in Trump’s appointments, and he seems to like to appoint generals to all sorts of things. OTOH, I know that for quite some time you thought well of Trump, and perhaps you retain some of that, even as he is ready terminate our trade deal with South Korea on the verge of possibly reigniting a full-blown Korean War.