There’s obviously a risk that the understaffed Trump administration will drop the ball on something. We all remember how the Bush administration resisted taking the threat of al-Qaeda seriously, and also (though they had plenty of time to prepare for it) their horrible response to Hurricane Katrina. A government that isn’t prepared can cost lives. The Trump administration could also struggle to meet unexpected contingencies overseas. So, I don’t want to unhesitatingly say that it’s a good thing that Trump has so far only made nominations for about 28 of the 690 positions requiring Senate confirmation.
But it’s a good thing.
In particular, they’ve done a very bad job of identifying people to serve in the deputy and undersecretary positions, including at the State Department and the Pentagon. And these figures are the ones who do most of the work. If you think Betsy DeVos and Ben Carson are going to be guiding the pulse of their departments, you must not have watched any of their confirmation hearings. They know absolutely nothing about what their departments do. They’ll have a few big items on their get-done list, but they wouldn’t know how to shape legislation to name a post office.
Because the folks who will actually need to transform law and policy won’t be fully in place until late spring or early summer, the amount of damage the Trump administration can do in its first year will be reduced.
I suppose it’s possible that the reverse could happen in some select cases. In these cases, the skeleton crews might have been a moderating influence on a radical Congress if they had been staffed up and ready to engage. Overall, however, I think it will prevent the administration from translating The Leader’s will into action.
Try to remember, for example, the folks in the Obama administration who worked on passing the Affordable Care Act. It would never have happened without Nancy-Ann DeParle and her staff. The idea that you can unravel Obamacare and replace it with something new without people in the administration steering the effort? Let’s just say that that is the opposite of leadership.
There’s no Trump appointee for any of the top State Department jobs below secretary nominee Rex Tillerson. No Trump appointee for any of the top Department of Defense jobs below retired general James Mattis. Treasury? Same story. Justice? It is one of two departments (along with, bizarrely, Commerce) where Trump has selected a deputy secretary. But no solicitor general, no one at civil rights, no one in the civil division, no one for the national security division.
And the same is true in department after department. Not to mention agencies without anyone at all nominated by the president-elect.
Trump has silly-low approval numbers, but he still should expect a little bit of a chance to get things done before people set up the left-wing equivalent of Tea Parties and demand to see his birth certificate. You’d think he’d have a little more urgency about using what little momentum he possesses to accomplish some stuff before everyone’s embarrassed to admit that they’ve ever been in the same room with him.
The Republican Party has a lot of power right now and a laundry list of evil deeds they want to carry out, but they’re much less united about what they’re for than they are about what they want to repeal. So, any self-imposed delay is doubly problematic for them, because failing to move quickly will bring these divisions out and turn some things from doable to undoable.
As long as their incompetence doesn’t get us killed, it will actually mitigate the damage.
Obama holdovers (Under-/Deputy-Secretaryish level) just re-appointed by Trump (with the official gloss being the “continuity” this would provide — think I heard some wingnut heads explode at that).
My presumption is that’s something it really galls them to have to do.
But even they must be starting to recognize the necessity of having somebody around who knows what the job is and how to do it.
Personal anecdote: I was science staff for a conservation non-profit during the worst of the dubya admin’s efforts to gut and roll back environmental protections (including the gross misconduct by Julie MacDonald at Interior in doing their bidding). Every lawsuit we participated in during my tenure was suggested/encouraged by fed agency employees, usually scientists, who were appalled by what they saw going on and being done to and with their work. This included several large, anonymous document dumps of dozens-of-pages-long incriminating e-mail chains.
“Permagov” has its upside, ag! And we’re going to need every bit of ethical, principled internal resistance from it for the next 4 years, minimum. And I can pretty much guarantee from my own experience that there will be some.
“Permagov” has its upside, ag! And we’re going to need every bit of ethical, principled internal resistance from it for the next 4 years, minimum. And I can pretty much guarantee from my own experience that there will be some. “
We’ll see, ob.
We’ll see.
If Trump rapidly succeeds in making scapegoats out of opposing bureaucrats…and he has certainly shown how effectively he can do that sort of thing to people using Twitter…I think that many people will shut up out of sheer self-interest.
My son is part of an equivalent group to yours…high-level environmental biologists. He thinks that they will mostly just keep their heads down and keep working. There is a whole new generation in place in organizations like that since the Bush II days, and most of them seem to have given up all hope of honest government due to the plentiful evidence over the past 30 years or so. They’ll do their work any which way they can because they believe in its importance for the survival of humankind and life on earth in general, but they won’t try to wise up the controllers. They have a hard enough job already. Why try the impossible?
AG
If they don’t try to wise up the controllers their work won’t count for shit. Science does no good let alone contribute to human survival if anything it learns just sits on a server.
They seem to think…also on ample evidence…that the whole governmental thing is cyclical. A constantly swinging penduum from too hard to too soft… too harsh to too permissive…throughout history.
Somewhere in the middle is where good things can happen.
They remind me of the monks of the Dark Ages who simply did what they did and in the process saved the learning of centuries of others.
I can’t say that they’re totally wrong…
AG
Right Arthur, For whoever has decades, centuries to spare. And anyone who does is not a leaving, breathing person: he’s a historical abstraction like all the industrious monks after the fall of the Roman Empire. In this case I agree with Henry Ford—history is bunk—and I’m a historian of sorts.
WE are all “history,” Quentin. History in the making….good and bad. And some of us are definitely not “bunk.”
One cannot reason with the kinds of people who produce dark ages. They are what they are. And…dark ages are of all different lengths, not just multi-century calamities. You could look at the swings in the fortunes of the U.S. culture and the swings in the makeup of the government and make a good case for certain “dark ages” and “renaissances” of fairly short lengths from the Post W.W. I years through to the present. The Roaring ’20s, the Depression ’30s, the Swing Era (largely presided over by F.D.R.) , the darkness of W.W. II, the Prosperous ’50s, the equally Roaring Mid-’60s/early ’70s, the depressing Yuppie Years, the Hopeful Clinton years, the dashed-of-all-hope Bush II years, the Hopey-Feely early Obama Years, the late Obama/early Trump Yupster years…
Up and down it goes, just like a big yo-yo.
People like my son could talk to the people who controlled the culture in say F.D.R.’s terms of office. Nixon? Not so much. And so on. The smart ones, the dedicated ones? They just turn on the grindstone, keep their noses really close to it and keep working while the villains are in power. (Etymology of the word villain: “base or low-born rustic,” from Anglo-French and Old French vilain “peasant, farmer, commoner, churl, yokel” Meaning: “character in a novel, play, etc. whose evil motives or actions help drive the plot”) When the plot changes, when heroes arise? (Etymology of the word “hero” rom same source: perhaps originally “defender, protector,” and from PIE root *ser- (1) “to watch over, protect” (see observe). Meaning: “man who exhibits great bravery” in any course of action is from 1660s in English.) Then it’s time to get crackin’.
So it goes.
Waste time trying to hustle a hustler?
Good work time irretrievably lost.
Bet on it.
ASG
Booman writes:
Sigh…
So you are saying that lost lives are worth it in order to further discredit Trump and the government in general?
Oh.
Nevermind.
Later…
AG
fungible lives, AG.
pick your corpse pile.
Lives are now “fungible,” Booman?
How…Kissengerian…of you!!!
Or perhaps…I hope…you meant that lives are “frangible.”
And…I refuse to forced to choose one pile of corpses over another.
I would die first.
A pile of one.
You?
ASG
Nice kidneys you’ve got there.
Simply arithmetic would say that if the lives lost through stonewalling/doing nothing are fewer than the lives lost by taking action, then the former option is preferable.
Anyway, it’s not the Dems’ fault that Trump hasn’t even apparently tried to staff up. You can’t confirm an empty chair.
Whoa. Is that not the reason 18,000 people died due to slow response to hurricane Katrina…simple stonewalling.
If your overall goal is to show the government (of any type) does not work, then understaff it to make sure it does not work. Of course Trump is too stupid to see it with that depth…but I’m sure he (and his cohort…mainly they’re types of libertarian wankers) thinks they are lazy do nothings and won’t be missed.
The very important tell was when Trump’s idiot libertarian animal murderer son asked how many staffers in the west wing would stay.
.
news. Lobbyists will fill the gap, and today we learn from the Hill Trump will propose dramatic cuts.
They will make yet another run at legal aid – and this time they will finally succeed. I was a legal aid lawyer – I know the good that is done. I know without it the poor will lose one of the few effective voices they have.
So really there isn’t any good news on the political front that I can see. I get people feel the need to highlight opposition, or incompetence.
But honestly it isn’t reality.
In reality the poor and immigrants are going to screwed massively.
And somehow not focusing on that seems wrong.
The only way those cuts can in any way approach reality in terms of “one hundred trillion infinity cuts” is to kill Medicaid/SCHIP, privatize Medicare, and slash discretionary spending in half.
The arts and such are gone, that’s true. Anything resembling good work in the DoJ is going to be halted or the attorneys will leave out of frustration. Women’s violence protection programs are on the butcher’s block.
However, this plan was pushed before in Congress and couldn’t get a majority of House votes, or anywhere close to a majority — even when it was nothing but noise and signaling of “who is the greatest conservative”.
It’s going to be horrible whatever ends up passing, but until I see numbers to programs on an actual piece of legislation I’m skeptical they’ll get anywhere close to these numbers.
Its these discretionary cuts in these smallish programs that are just going to really hurt people.
Legal aid – I spend time dealing with landlords who wouldn’t fix roofs for example. That won’t happen now, and nobody will notice it.
And that story will be told over and over again – and I predict even the liberal blogs will barely notice.
There is no good news coming.
People are in a very real denial.
They think these hearings matter one bit.
You don’t have to believe in the coming of some fascistic state to be depressed – you just have to know what the likely result will be.
The environment is going to get clobbered, and the damage will be mostly irreversible.
In some ways the changes coming there are really the worst.
May I tease the following apart because from a politically strategic perspective, you’re raising two slightly different issues that are easier to address separately.
Didn’t people vote for Trump because he promised to cut welfare and deport immigrants?
Trump and his voters are “thinking” and speaking like moral and ethical heathens. Going at them directly for this will only cause them to double-down and become more invested in “their way.” Have we forgotten so soon the impact of “basket of deplorables?”
When you say “not focusing on that,” I assume you mean making a lot of noise about every proposed cut to social/welfare type programs and forewarning all the negative outcomes of such cuts. This is what Democrats have been doing for decades. Perhaps it helps to reduce the amount of the cuts. Then the cuts are passed and implemented and the majority of the voting public doesn’t see all the dire predictions come into being and/or no effective change at all. From a perceptual perceptive, Democrats/liberals end up looking like Chicken Little.
At the moment the Trump and the GOP can do practically anything they want. And as usual, the impacts of what they do to ordinary people won’t be seen for some time. Long after people have forgotten how this “new normal” came to be and who and what is responsible for it if they had any inkling in the first place. Plus, it’s incredibly difficult to predict the specific outcomes of most cuts to this or that policy.
The best way for liberals/democrats to be heard is to keep it simple and tangible and the impacts easily measurable after the fact. For example, tax cuts, “do Americans really want more income and wealth inequality? It’s not bad enough already? Two, three years down the road that’s exactly what tax cuts produce. IOW stick to the broadest possible and predictable outcomes that will impact the largest number of people in their everyday lives.
This won’t work if liberal/democrats persist in their belief of neoliberal economics and war is good. If they want to hold onto those, refuse to acknowledge their decades of participation in that, then the best they can do is claim slower is better. That privatization fast-track for public schools it too much dislocation to absorb quickly, and slower is surer. If that’s how they want to play it, as far as I’m concerned they can go to hell dragging all their failed public policies behind them.
not in the central states; they voted for a restoration of 60’s era [postwar] middle class possibilities
they voted for a restoration of 60’s era [postwar] middle class possibilities
I guess we’ve advanced; Reagan was selling the restoration of the 1950s. From a purely economic perspective, longing for the 1960s is more rational. The economy was chugging along better than ever for most people, jobs were available, and income/wealth inequality was declining. Still, there were social pressures and changes evolving that soon enough began to pinch and reduce the possibilities. Worse job and income security and stability were slowly eroded. The Guardian article this week on Bethlehem, PA included a couple of people that mentioned the generations that had both before the steel mill closed over two decades ago. And it’s not simply about money, but having a steady job gives a person meaning in life (even when they don’t much like the job).
it’s very different from Reagan. it’s the opportunities, security, the possibilities that the previous generation counted on. what requires analysis is precisely how to address what has gone wrong. it’s not only outsourcing factories. a wonderful NYTimes article today on Davos, that I’m sure you and others will enjoy,
“no clue” doesn’t even begin to capture it
– wow, I guess a whole bunch of ppl were laughing so loud the online edition had to rewrite the article. here it is from the print edition, then I give the link
print:title is Amid Populist Fury, Elite Mull Inequity but Avoid Talk of Sacrifice.
my favorite was some guy Abidali Neemuchwala blah blah 1.8 million plus last year blah blah whose diagnosis is “People have to take more ownership of upgrading themselves on a continuous basis”
there was were some more also yesterday, will look
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/business/dealbook/world-economic-forum-davos-finance.html
Why would they have a “clue?” It’s all working swell for them and theirs. Some of them have never known or experienced anything else. Those that have are quick to forget.
Each generation of ordinary people remembers what once was from what was during their own time from say age eight to ten to age thirty or so. Then they also forget or mis-remember their own personal screw-ups and the help they received to undo some of that and generally, also forget that there were factors that they didn’t contribute to that made the times swell or awful.
The lucky-ducky generation, IMHO, were those born too late to experience the deprivation of the Great Depression and too young to be actively engaged in WWII and the Korean War and too old for the Vietnam War. Being of that “baby bust” generation (and the large number of American mail deaths from those first two wars) and entering the workforce when the general economy was good, jobs were available and soon enough turned into jobs with good pay and security. What they absorbed second hand from parents/elders were 1) being prudent with one’s money and 2) a reverence for war and/or the US military.
Boomers got too much of the #2 and too little of #1 along with the expectation that a good, decent paying job with security was theirs for the asking. Except with the beginning of the return of married women to the workforce in the 1960s and the size of the Boomer generation, structurally the US labor shortage ended for the first time in US history. That made labor more expendable and cheaper. And so on.
I subscribe to a very reductionist Christianity (the only kind that would ever survive in my house) that places great importance in how the poor are treated. So for me it is my religion I guess.
As Dr Barber said truly, in America Christians talk so much about what God says so little, while saying so little about what God says so much.
The simple truth is that in America the poor are hated, or ignored, or feared.
Their pain is largely invisible.
On April 1st as many as a million people lost access to food stamps. Almost all I am sure survived, their lives made just a little meaner, and just a little tougher.
I wrote about welfare reform on October of 2015 – it really was why I was for Sanders.
But I know Marie – the vast majority of people could give a flying fuck. I am not saying that to be mean or sarcastic. And I mean most Democrats in that. Poverty policy doesn’t make the front page of Dkos – unless it is about Republicans. It has been years since the words Welfare Reform appeared on any front page of a blog that I read.
So you are correct – from a political standpoint we should be focusing on the middle class.
Neo-liberalism works precisely because the poor are invisible.
It still isn’t right and doesn’t feel right though.
I didn’t use the term “middle class” (or even working class) for good reasons. First the terms are so poorly defined in the minds of Americans that most people, from struggling workers in all sectors to those that have secure and much higher than median wages, think they are middle class. Second it’s divisive, as all categorizations of people generally are. Finally and most importantly, income and wealth inequality hurt those at the bottom of the wealth and income ladder far more than they do those on a higher rung. It may pinch those at the income/wealth 80% threshold, at 90% people are doing okay, and at 95% people don’t live like billionaires but they live very well and have the means to be financially secure.
Thus, income/wealth inequality is broad and simple enough to be heard by at least 80% of the public that are negatively impacted by it. Doing something about that inequality means that all of them can say, “yes, less inequality and I’ll be doing a little bit better.” That’s not what’s heard when the focus is on the poor and government has to help them. It’s fine when most people are feeling economically okay the the future looks good enough. At those times, they are fine with directing more dollars at those suffering. What’s been transpiring since about 1980 is helping those at the bottom hold onto purchasing power and cutting taxes (in various ways) for those that are well above median income. The ones in between have seen their wages flat-lined or decreased, have little discretionary income and therefore, little to no savings, and their kids can only go to college by taking on a huge amount of debt. All of that contributes to income/wealth inequality.
A 20-year old bill, by then…
Is grudge-holding an Olympic event?
When you defend it 20 years later it is.
It ceases to be about the past, but rather about your view of the present.
Since it effects the present, and was in fact why up to a million lost Food Stamps in 2016.
Technically, the people did not vote for Trump. The people voted for Hillary. The Electoral College voted for Trump.
63 million did vote for Trump. Are they not people?
Enough people in more than enough states chose Trump. You may not like the results, but they are what they are according the rules that are well known and have been in place for a long time. Claiming otherwise is a good way to remain stuck in the past over which nothing can be done and what sore loser do.
aren’t is “the people”.
How is this hard?
When you’ve got an ax to grind, everything looks like a whetstone.
FFS — read the Constitution. It’s been around for a long time without any change in how the President is elected. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Shhh. You’re not supposed to mention that. Just remember, 66 million<63 million.
It’s the ‘right’ people….if you know what I mean.
::cough cough::
.
My guess is that anything that comes from the next two years will come from Congress anyway.
I mean, we are in the Second Gilded Age, so it’s appropriate that we return to 19th century governance.
Expect it the cabinet/administration to be not much different from the MAGA concert. Scheduled to start at 4:00 EST and at 4:20 yet to begin.
The cameras aren’t panning much on the crowd, but no throngs around the reflecting pool as there were in ’08.
Nothing says ‘Make America Great Again’ like a dead stage and piping in recorded Rolling Stones songs (after fifteen minutes or so of a few military bands, military marching bands, and Jon Voight saying something).
The Guardian hung in there (I couldn’t). Start at the bottom of page 4 and scroll up. (The writers did something with mostly nothing.) Trump saluted the Abraham Lincoln statue — if this is something the presidents or president-elects have been doing for some time, they need to stop doing it because it’s creepy.
The top civil service senior managers who remain in place for Trump’s arrival have been through this drill before. Most of them will not be willing to sacrifice the mission of the agencies they’ve given a fair amount of their life to unless ordered by Congress to do so, and then you will see the resignations and the post-resignation protests.
The agencies will function up to the point that requires an explicit Presidential decision. That is where Cheney dropped the ball or ran with it, depending on your propensity for seeing dysfunctional governance and the facts at your disposal.
It’s the news media who will be buffaloed as to what to do. Who speaks for the department or commission or agency? It can’t be someone who has not been confirmed by the GOP rubber-stamp Senate.
Like the Olympic torch, the dumpster will be lit at noon tomorrow. And an official voice will intone, “Let the games begin.”
Graft-host disease, in other words.
Worth also remembering that the Civil and Foreign Service staffs at the agencies can really slow down and endlessly complicate regulation or deregulation to a considerable extent. But what’s most likely to happen this first year is that the HOR’s budget will simply zero out a whole bunch of programs (climate change, women’s reproductive rights, some foreign aid programs, etc., etc.) with the concurrence of the Senate most (but not all) of the time. That’s where the damage will come from.