Chaffetz On Exec. Branch Vacancies: Trump Has ‘No Intention’ Of Full Staffing

United States President Donald J. Trump chats with US Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) after addressing a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, February 28, 2017. Credit: Chris Kleponis / C... United States President Donald J. Trump chats with US Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) after addressing a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, February 28, 2017. Credit: Chris Kleponis / CNP - NO WIRE SERVICE - Photo by: Chris Kleponis/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images MORE LESS
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The House Oversight Committee chairman said Monday that the Trump administration will likely leave many executive branch positions vacant, because “they have no intention of funding those types of things.”

In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said that the Trump administration simply didn’t believe that many government functions, which would otherwise fall to currently vacant positions in the federal bureaucracy, were necessary.

“I think what you’re going to see, actually, long-term, is there’s a lot of them that they’re not going to fill because they have no intention of funding those types of things, particularly in the Department of Education,” he said.

“That whole process of all these thousands of appointments that need to go through the process and then the Senate confirmation process, this is a huge story,” Chaffetz continued. “But I know there are lots of agencies where they’re not going to put in specific people because they just don’t believe that that function should even be there.”

Chaffetz isn’t alone in that assessment of the Trump administration: President Donald Trump himself told “Fox and Friends” on Feb. 28 that there were hundreds of positions in government that he “didn’t want to fill.”

“A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint someone because they’re unnecessary to have,” he said. “In government, we have too many people.”

The White House released a draft budget in mid-March that sketched dramatic cuts in various departments, including State, Education, and Housing and Urban Development.

And Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February that his goal in public service is the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”

“If you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason, and that is the deconstruction,” he said at the conference.

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Notable Replies

  1. Melanoma says: Donnie has NEVER had a full staff…

  2. Flies at half-staff on a good day?

  3. “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’ ”

    ― Isaac Asimov

  4. Tax reform will take a ton of work by a ton of appointed staff and very savvy negotiators on many fronts. And a lot of time and effort on the part of people behind those people. Without a full ship of talented staff, tax reform doesn’t even get out of bed. Trump isn’t even close to the staffing he needs for that to happen.

    So, saying there won’t be full staffing, ever, means that Trump isn’t going to fight even moderately hard for any of the things he promised. This whole episode is/was all just fundraising for himself and his family.

  5. Translation: Any governmental function worth doing can be splendidly handled by the “Dream Team” of Mr. D.ump, Herr Bannon, Jared, Ivanka and sometimes Pence.

    All the rest is not just superflous, but counterproductive because it interferes with D.ump’s freedom first to follow Bannon’s dark vision, and second, to reflexively lash out unpredictably as D.ump’s own pathology dictates.

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