Tara Golshan · Tuesday, February 21, 2017, 1:35 pm
There are 549 key positions in President Donald Trump’s administration that require Senate confirmation. Trump has yet to nominate anyone to 515 of them. According to Max Stier, the CEO of the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, when it comes to political appointments, Trump is lagging behind almost every recent president — and he has a long way to go.
Of course, presidential transition is always a difficult process. There are upward of 4,000 positions that can be filled by presidential appointment, and no administration has handled this perfectly. But some transitions have been smoother than others.
Currently, only 14 of Trump’s Cabinet appointees have been confirmed. He has 20 more appointments awaiting Senate confirmation. To date, one of his appointments, Michael Flynn, has resigned amid scandal over a call with Russia. Another, Andrew Puzder, withdrew his nomination for labor secretary.
Trump is known for operating with a small team; his campaign operated with a staff of fewer than a dozen for much of the election cycle and long touted the efficiency of vetting ideas through a two- to five-person chain. But despite Trump’s claims of a great and speedy transition, the reality is that his small team has hit a lot of roadblocks and has many holes in key positions.
To understand how the Trump administration fell behind and the risks of a slow appointment process, I called Stier, whose group worked with the Trump administration to plan for the transition. Stier warns that the White House should not be run like Trump ran his campaign, and that during a time of global unrest, a need for an efficient and strategic government is paramount.
“It’s not good to just meet what others have done — you need to do better,” Stier tells me. “Because things move faster, the world is more dangerous, and you need to be operating more effectively, faster, to meet your obligations as the head of our government.”
Read more
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/21/14672984/trump-transition-slow
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
2 comments:
Do you have a list or know where I can get one?
There was a link in the VOX article, but it is now broken. Sorry - no further information. You could try to Google "government positions Trump has not filled."
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