WHITE HOUSE TODAY HAS THEIR OWN SPYS INSIDE EACH DEPARTMENT

…Our vindictive President

 

Advisers are assigned to each agency for monitoring the cabinet’s loyalty to the president.

 

Here are some examples of the over-reach by the US White House on their own Cabinet agencies:

 

A political appointee is today installed by the White House, and he is charged with keeping watch over the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator.  The adviser, Scott Pruitt and his aides have offered unsolicited advice so often, that after only four weeks on the job, EPA Administrator Pruitt has shut the “spy” out of the staff meetings.  This is according to two senior administration officials.

 

Over at the Pentagon, they’re privately calling a former Marine officer and fighter pilot who’s supposed keeps watch on the Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, the aide is called: “the commissar,” according to a high-ranking defense official. This is a direct reference to the Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to Soviet military units.  This was to ensure their commanders remained loyal to the party.

 

Even though most members of President Trump’s Cabinet do not yet have their leadership teams in place, nor do they even have top deputies installed, they do have senior aides installed by the White House who are charged with monitoring the secretaries’ loyalty.  This is according to eight officials in and outside the administration.

Kinda sounds like we are hearing information on how the authoritarian Vladimir Putin probably deals with his “communist party leaders” inside the Russian Kremlin. I guess President Trump, who idolizes Putin, he decided to do the same.

 

This dark, shadow type government of political appointees with the title of senior White House adviser is embedded at every Cabinet department and in many US agencies.  And the adviser’s offices are either inside or just outside the cabinet secretary’s suite. The White House has installed at least 16 of these so called, “advisers” at all the departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and even at some smaller agencies such as at NASA. This is according to records obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request.

 

Yes, it took an actual FIA request to obtain a confirmation of this fact.

 

Oh, and these “aides or advisors” report, not to the cabinet secretary, but to the Office of Cabinet Affairs, which is overseen by Rick Dearborn, a White House deputy chief of staff. A top Dearborn aide, John Mashburn, leads a weekly conference call with all of these “adviser-snitches”, who are in constant contact with the White House.

These aides act as a go-between on Trump policy matters for the agencies and the White House. Behind the scenes, they’re on a very different mission.  That mission is to monitor the Cabinet leaders to make sure they are carrying out the president’s agenda.  And that they don’t stray too far from the White House’s talking points.  This was confirmed by several officials with knowledge of the arrangement.

 

This approach may sound like this is the way things are done when the powers in the White House changes parties.  But this adviser arrangement is highly unusual. It wasn’t used by presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush or Bill Clinton when it went from Republican to Democrat, or vive-versa.  And it’s also different from the traditional liaisons who help the White House’s political appointees in the various agencies. Critics say these competing chains of command eventually will breed serious mistrust, chaos and overall inefficiency, especially as new department heads build their complete staffs.

 

“It’s healthy when there is some daylight between the president’s Cabinet and the White House, with room for some disagreement,” said Kevin Knobloch, who was chief of staff under Obama to then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.  “That can only happen when agency secretaries have their own loyal team, who report directly to them,” he said. “Otherwise it comes off as not a ringing vote of confidence in the individual Cabinet offices.”

 

Of course, the White House declined to comment about these appointees on the record, citing the old “saw” of “confidentiality of personnel matters and internal operations”. But one White House official, of course, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that instead of holding the agencies accountable, the appointees “technically report” to each department’s chief of staff or to the secretaries themselves.  But their “loyalty” is to the White House, not the cabinet.

 

“The “advisers” were a main point of contact in the early transition process as the agencies were being set up,” the official said in an email. “Like every White House, this one is in frequent contact with agencies and departments.”  However, so far, the advisers’ power is today heightened by the lack of complete leadership teams at many of the departments.

 

Yes, every president does try to assert authority over the executive branch, with varying degrees of success, but this is the first time a president has used an authoritarian dictator’s approach to their cabinets.  In fact, this is exactly how the former Dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussain, structured his subordinate leadership teams.

 

After the Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had made some political gaffes, Obama aides wanted to install a political aide at the Justice Department to monitor him. But Holder was furious about the intrusion and blocked the plan. And during his tenure as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates also pushed back against a top official the White House wanted at the Pentagon to guide Asia policy, wary of having someone so close to the president in his orbit.

But perhaps the idea for these “advisers” came from the former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).  Gingrich was a Trump adviser, who had said that perhaps the president needed to dispatch political allies to each agency to monitor a bureaucracy that’s being targeted for reduction.  “If you drain the swamp, you better have someone who watches over the alligators,” Gingrich said. “These people are actively trying to undermine the new government. And they think it’s their moral obligation to do so.”

At the Transportation Department (DOT), former Pennsylvania lobbyist Anthony Pugliese shuttles back and forth between the White House and DOT headquarters, according to an agency official. His office is just 20 paces from Secretary Elaine Chao’s, the official said.

 

The arrangement is collegial in some offices, including at Transportation and Interior, where aides to Chao and Secretary Ryan Zinke insisted that the White House advisers work as part of the team, attending meetings, helping form an infrastructure task force and designing policy on public lands.

 

Tensions between the White House and the Cabinet already have spilled into public view. Mattis, the Defense Secretary, and Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly were caught unaware in January by the scope of the administration’s first travel ban. The president has been furious about leaks on national security matters.

 

Trump does not have long-standing relationships or close personal ties with most of the leaders in his Cabinet. That’s why gauging their loyalty is so important, said officials who described the structure.

 

“A lot of these [Cabinet heads] have come from roles where they’re the executive, just as President Trump was” said a senior administration official not authorized to publicly discuss the White House advisers. “But when you become head of an agency, you’re no longer your own person. It’s a hard change for a lot of these people: They’re not completely autonomous anymore.”

 

Many of the senior advisers lack expertise in their agency’s mission and came from the business or political world. They include Trump campaign aides, former Republican National Committee staffers, conservative activists, lobbyists and entrepreneurs.

 

At Homeland Security, for example, is Frank Wuco, a former security consultant whose blog Red Wire describes the terrorist threat as rooted in Islam. To explain the threat, he appears on YouTube as a fictional jihadist.

Matt Mowers, a former aide to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) who was Trump’s national field coordinator before landing at the State Department as senior adviser, said through a spokesman that he “leads interagency coordination” among the White House, agencies and the National Security Council and “coordinates on policy and personnel.”

 

Mr. Mowers sits at the edge of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s seventh-floor suite, dubbed Mahogany Row. But neither Tillerson nor his chief of staff are his direct boss.

 

Many of the advisers arrived from the White House with the small groups known as “beachhead teams” that started work on Jan. 20. One of the mandates at the top of their to-do list now, Bennett said, is making sure the agencies are identifying regulations the administration wants to roll back and vetting any new ones.

 

At the Pentagon, Brett Byers acts as a go-between between Mattis’s team and the White House, largely on “bureaucratic” matters, said an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues.

 

Elsewhere, resentment has built up. Pruitt is bristling at the presence of former Washington state senator Don Benton, who ran the president’s Washington state campaign and is now the EPA’s senior White House adviser, said two senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

 

These officials said Benton piped up so frequently during policy discussions that he had been un-invited from many of them. One of the officials described the situation as akin to an episode of the HBO comedy series “Veep.”

 

It is said that Donald Trump’s approach may not be so different from Abraham Lincoln’s. But this was because Lincoln was coming into the White House after more than a ­half-century of the Democrats being in power. Lincoln had worked swiftly to remove hostile bureaucrats and to appoint allies. In addition, Lincoln had to deal with an Army led by many senior officers who still sympathized with the South, as well as a government beset by many internal divisions.  President Trump does not have this level of division within the government.

 

But if that were to occur today, we would all be made aware of that situation by a “Tweet” from our Commander-in-Chief.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017