The presence of Heritage in the executive branch made the mainstream conservative movement—whose articles of faith Trump so floridly flaunted in his candidacy—the primary lobbying group within his administration. As of early 2019, Heritage had a remarkable 114 former employees or interns who were either serving or had served in the Trump administration. Heritage was not alone in influencing policy by influencing staffing. There were also, ProPublica discovered, 35 disciples of the free-market libertarians Charles G. and David H. Koch, not to mention 187 registered federal lobbyists.
What made the Trump administration unique was that its mundane reality contrasted so sharply with the grandiose vision of the presidential campaign. At the crux of that campaign was the idea that Trump himself was so rich that he would be above influence. “While I’m beating my opponents in the polls,” he’d tweeted in late July 2015, a month into his campaign, “I’m also beating lobbyists, special interests & donors that are supporting them with billions.”
Later, tweeting from the White House during the hours of “executive time” devoted to Fox News marathons, Trump frequently invoked the Deep State, an invention of that network and its Internet subalterns. He applied the term to a ruling elite made up of career federal lawyers and bureaucrats, rank-and-file Pentagon staffers, what little remained of the public intelligentsia, and the failing, fawning media that clung to this group like a barnacle. The Deep State was the stuff of second-rate spy fiction, only it was coming from inside the Oval Office.
In a sense, Trump was right. There was a shadowy cabal of expert operators manipulating the American government. Only he was wrong about who they were. It was the lobbyists he appointed, not the bureaucrats he inherited, who came closest to forming a Deep State. Its agents were like cancer cells, activated by the Heritage Foundation and the Koch network to eat away at the federal apparatus from the inside.
These cells had names.
Nominated as a top lawyer at the EPA, Erik Baptist had worked for the American Petroleum Institute, fighting the good fight for the oil and gas industry. Because the API was a lobbying group, Baptist’s appointment would seem to be in direct contravention of Executive Order 13770, the one White House officials touted as the toughest edict on ethics to ever emerge from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That executive order would mean nothing if new hires were granted waivers, as Baptist was. His (partial) waiver was signed by EPA acting general counsel Kevin S. Minoli, who said it was “in the public interest” to have Baptist join the agency because of his “expertise,” neglecting to mention that his expertise was in dismantling environmental protections. Baptist eventually became a high-ranking administrator in the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.
Trump used such waivers—sixteen granted by the spring of 2017—as a loophole through which he could evade his own decree. That explained how David L. Bernhardt became a federal employee. Bernhardt lobbied and worked for at least a dozen corporate concerns: the Rosemont Copper Company, Cobalt International Energy, Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks, Garrison Diversion Conservancy District. What did one make of a man like that? Naturally, one made him a top deputy in the Department of the Interior.
Kelly Marie Cleary went from a lucrative position at the white-shoe firm of Akin Gump, where she spent ten years working on behalf of clients in the medical industry, including insurance companies, to serving as the chief legal officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at the Department of Health and Human Services. Maya Michelle Noronha had been a Republican operative who worked on voter suppression efforts for the Republican National Lawyers Association, which inexplicably qualified her to serve as a special adviser on civil rights at HHS.
Kevin O’Scannlain, an associate counsel to the president, had an astonishingly prolific lobbying profile: Discover, the credit card company; Cathay Pacific, the Asian airline; Rite Aid, the pharmacy chain; First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting; Emirates Investment and Development. One might have thought that a former lobbyist for Lehman Brothers, the failed investment bank identified with the worst excesses of the housing and financial crisis of 2008, would not be the person to help enact Trump’s populist agenda. And yet there O’Scannlain was, a White House special assistant.
In one of the Trump administration’s most brazen nominations, Andrew R. Wheeler was picked to be the deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Wheeler was a former coal lobbyist who did not appear to believe in climate change. It mattered little. With Democrats defeated and Republicans cowed, Wheeler was confirmed in the spring of 2018.
Did all these people succumb to their own worst impulses once installed in the federal government? Of course not. They simply did not belong there, in a White House that was to be above influence, above cronyism, above the buying-and-selling that had marked earlier administrations.
Only the task was too great. No one was up for it at the start. Later, no one bothered to revive it. “Draining the swamp is very difficult,” Bannon would come to concede. “People have to go in with a maniacal focus if they’re going to do it, and in this administration, there just has been no center of gravity to do that.”
Chapter 6
“Kind of a Rough Start”
By the early twenty-first century, limited government had become a religion for the right, one whose central conviction of “less is best” was mouthed by virtually every candidate seeking office on the Republican line. Through the dint of repetition, the phrase lost all meaning, other than to serve as a show of faith to the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who did so much to demonize the federal government but so little to actually contract it.
Reagan famously charged that government was the problem, not the solution, but during his time in the White House, he tempered this animosity, adding some 95,000 civilian (i.e., nonmilitary) employees to the federal rolls. He also raised taxes on eleven separate occasions. Reagan did so little on the regulatory front that a 1988 report by the libertarian Mises Institute compared Reagan unfavorably to his predecessor Jimmy Carter, the Georgia liberal.
Bill Clinton reduced the federal workforce by 351,000, in good part because of reorganization efforts like the one undertaken by Elaine Kamarck. After he left the Oval Office, the federal workforce increased again, with the Foundation for Economic Education, a think tank promoting free-market principles, estimating that George W. Bush and Obama together added 399,000 government employees. Curiously, the rate of growth was greater under Bush (17.2 percent for nonmilitary jobs) than it was for Obama (10.1 percent).
John DiIulio Jr. was that rare political scientist who argued in favor of an expanding bureaucracy, but only as a means of limiting the reach of the federal government. Author of the 2014 book Bring Back the Bureaucrats, DiIulio called the federal government “a grotesque Leviathan by proxy, in which an expanding mass of state and local government workers, for-profit contractors, and nonprofit grant recipients administers a vast portion of federal money and responsibilities.”
DiIulio believed that any limited government conservative should want the return of these outsourced functions to the government, away from the secondary state on which the government had come to rely. “Paradoxical though it may sound,” he wrote in a 2014 Washington Post op-ed, “more federal bureaucrats means less big government, and more direct public administration means better government.”
DiIulio’s counterintuitive ideas could have actually helped Trump form a leaner, more efficient government less reliant on outside interests. This would have taken surgical precision: knowing where to cut, where to graft, where to leave things as they were.
There was no time for this, nor much interest. Trump did not so much hack away at the limbs of the federal government as inflict a couple of cuts that were left to fester, until the surrounding tissue died.
The disastrous results of this approach became apparent in the spring of 2017, after the cabinet confirmation battles that took up the first two months of the Trump administration. Hin
ts, however, had come during the transition, when the future administration’s DNA was being cobbled together in Trump Tower and the F Street headquarters in Washington.
Every administration sent landing teams into federal agencies. These were meant to prepare incoming political appointees for the job of managing thousands of people in what were, in essence, public corporations. Awaiting these landing teams at each agency were career staffers and political appointees from the outgoing administration who were to show the newcomers how to keep the place running.
A department head at Housing and Urban Development thought that calling the administration arrivals “beachhead teams”—an advent of the Trump transition—was, in itself, a “combative” move, one with hints of a military invasion. “Doesn’t set a great tone,” she would recall thinking.
Only the invasion was not especially fearsome. “It wasn’t clear what they were seeking to do,” remembered the HUD official, who has since left the federal government. Many had only an “elementary understanding” of federal housing policy and asked career staffers “very basic questions.” Another, less senior housing staffer said he had “zero” interaction with members of the Trump beachhead team.
The HUD transition was led by Shawn Krause, who had no experience working for the government. For more than two decades, she had made an impressive climb to the top of Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest issuer of loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration. By 2016, Krause was the top Quicken lobbyist in Washington, where the company was facing a Department of Justice lawsuit into deceptive underwriting practices. Quicken’s chief executive defended her appointment to the housing beachhead team. “When you think about draining the swamp, this goes right in line with that,” he said to the Wall Street Journal, without explaining what he meant.
“We started planning for the transition before the election,” said one high-ranking treasury deputy who left the department in July 2017. She had been there for thirty-five years, had seen three previous transitions, those of Clinton, Bush, and Obama. But she had never seen anything like this. There was, she remembers, “a whole week before we saw anyone,” after which people “sort of trickled in.” Those people appeared to lack treasury experience. Some, she remembers, were unfocused and lost.
What little trust existed between the Trump transition teams and career staffers in the federal agencies eroded altogether in early December 2016, about a month into the transition, when someone at the Department of Energy leaked a memorandum in which transition officials sought the names of programs focused on climate change, and the names of the people who worked on those programs. To critics of Trump, this confirmed that his administration would be both anti-government and antiscience; Trump loyalists saw an effort to undermine his presidency before it even began, evidence of what would come to be known as the Deep State at work.
About two weeks later, there was another leak, this time of a transition team memorandum to the State Department, asking about “existing programs and activities to promote gender equality,” leading the denunciations and counter-denunciations that would become standard political discourse in the Trump era. The more substantive outcome was that the business of staffing the government, while never exactly dispassionate, now fully succumbed to politics.
Still, a transition needed to happen; that a Trump presidency awaited on the far shore made that no less imperative. Gina McCarthy, the outgoing EPA administrator, practically pleaded for the transition team to arrive, even if she knew perfectly well that her successor, Scott Pruitt, was going to undo much of her work. In early December, she admitted to being “most anxious to have the transition team around. We have had one individual who came the day before Thanksgiving, and we have not heard from anybody since.”
Some agencies, like Commerce, saw their transitions go relatively well. Penny Pritzker, the outgoing secretary, was a marathoner who told her deputies that they were going to “run through the tape,” finishing out their term at Commerce forcefully and with grace. She wrote her then unknown successor—this would turn out to be Wilbur Ross—a twenty-page, single-spaced letter, a playbook of the kind nobody had provided her with when she stepped into the federal bureaucracy for the first time.
“The Department that you will be leading,” the letter began, “is a special place that has high-impact missions carried out by dedicated public servants, but it is a place that is often underestimated from the outside.” She proceeded to outline what the department did, and what it could do better.
Commerce, which employed 46,000 people, had an impossibly broad mandate. Among its twelve bureaus were the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and the International Trade Administration. Pritzker explained how these and other parts of the department worked, showing an appreciation for the sophistication and importance of the job. There was something humble, almost inspiring, in the Harvard-educated billionaire delving into the minutiae of the federal bureaucracy. It was clear from the letter that Pritzker had come to appreciate that bureaucracy, though knotted and unwieldy it could be.
The incoming Trump administration sent in a beachhead team led by William “Willie” C. T. Gaynor II, a Washington lobbyist, who oversaw a competent turning-over of the department. On the last day of the administration, Pritzker literally ran through racing tape that had been placed across the hallway of her fifth-floor office, thus signifying the end of the Obama administration.
“That was so cool,” one person present remembered Gaynor saying.
Things were not cool at the EPA. Christopher S. Zarba started working at the EPA in the early 1980s when it was led by Anne Gorsuch Burford, the conservative politician from Colorado (her son Neil was Trump’s first pick for the Supreme Court). That had been a divisive time, but he outlasted it, and twelve years under two Bushes, neither exactly a conservationist. During the Obama administration, he was made the staff director for the agency’s science advisory board.
Then came Trump. Instead of the “seasoned professionals” Zarba expected, the beachhead team that arrived at EPA headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue was full of “junior” people, including many from the office of Senator James M. Inhofe, the Republican from Oklahoma who was the most notorious climate-change denier in Congress.
“The people that came were just so unqualified,” Zarba said. They were led by Myron Ebell, a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, who had devoted his life to combating the growing certitude of climate science. Once a fringe figure, he was now presiding over the EPA transition.
Sometimes, the transition played out like a tragicomedy. At the Department of Agriculture, which employed 100,000 people and had a budget of about $140 billion, the Trump beachhead team was for a time comprised of a single person, Brian A. “Klip” Klippenstein. Klippenstein’s sole qualification appeared to be his leadership of Protect the Harvest, a clever name for a group that advocated for the factory farming of animals. Klippenstein’s advocacy extended to the defense of “puppy mills,” grindingly inhumane operations where dogs were bred purely for profit.
Klippenstein was supposed to have help from Joel Leftwich, a former Pepsi lobbyist who was the Republican staff director of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. Leftwich joined the transition in November, only to be pushed out a month later. That left Klippenstein as the sole delegate of the incoming Trump administration at Agriculture. This was less a beachhead than a toehold.
“Kind of a rough start.” That was the frank verdict delivered in January 2017 on the transition by Senate Majority Leader McConnell. He offered that Democrats were gumming up the transition because they were “in a bad mood.”
He was right about the bad mood, wrong about its power to sway a process that had withstood many previous waves of post-election ill will. Former administration officials would say frankly that they hadn’t planned for a transition because they hadn’t pl
anned to win. Once they won, they had more important things to do than concern themselves with the particulars of management, especially of agencies like the EPA that they were suspicious of to begin with. So they outsourced the job, did it on the quick.
Or they simply left the job undone. According to the Partnership for Public Service, Trump should have had about a hundred officials nominated by the time he took office. He had all of twenty-eight. “The Empty Trump Administration,” read a Bloomberg headline.
Back in the spring of 2016, Trump had envisioned “a government based on relationships. I want people in those jobs who care about winning,” he said in a New York Times interview. A year later, this team of winners was proving remarkably difficult to assemble. Aware that he was being criticized for turning the federal bureaucracy into a ghost town, Trump took to his favorite outlet, Fox News, to argue that the understaffing was strategic, even philosophic. “I look at some of the jobs and it’s people over people over people,” he told the network in February. “I say, ‘What do all these people do?’ You don’t need all those jobs.”
Trump’s premium on “relationships” turned into an obsession when it came to the histories of potential hires, in particular of whether they’d been critical of him or supportive of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, for example, wanted Elliott Abrams, a respected statesman, as his top deputy. Trump met Abrams and liked him, but in 2016, Abrams had written a column critical of Trump in the Weekly Standard. The criticism in “When You Can’t Stand Your Candidate” wasn’t even all that strong, but it did predict a Trump defeat. Trump wasn’t known to be a reader of the Weekly Standard, but someone showed him the column, almost certainly someone from the West Wing’s nationalist faction. The Abrams nomination was scotched.
The Best People Page 11