I have considerable sympathy with the assertion of the editors of the Washington Post that President Trump is wrong in withdrawing the appointment of Elaine McCusker to the post of Department of Defense Comptroller:
ELAINE McCUSKER is a professional. A career civil servant specializing in the technical but crucial area of defense budgeting and finance, with prior experience in academia, the private sector and the Senate Armed Services Committee, she was a logical choice for the office to which President Trump elevated her in 2017: deputy comptroller of the Defense Department. She also was amply qualified for promotion to comptroller, a nomination Mr. Trump submitted to the Senate last November.
Yet she will not be getting the job after all — the latest public servant of integrity to face career consequences in apparent retaliation for Mr. Trump’s impeachment over allegations that he abused his power by withholding military aid from Ukraine to force Kyiv to investigate his political rival, former vice president Joe Biden.
but I don’t think they are asking the right question. They almost get to it here:
Every president is entitled to a senior staff of his or her own choosing.
but shy off. I think the question they should be asking is whether presidents are entitled to senior staffs they can trust? The balance of the editorial actually undermines their case:
All she did, while serving last year as acting Pentagon comptroller, was to tell the White House, via internal emails, that its holdup of the nearly $400 million Ukraine aid package might violate federal law, possibly causing the appropriations to lapse. She reacted with exasperated incredulity when an Office of Management and Budget official, Michael P. Duffey, tried to blame her for putting the funds at risk. In a September email, one of a series made public by Just Security, a website specializing in foreign affairs and defense policy, Ms. McCusker wrote, “You can’t be serious. I am speechless.â€
The civil bureaucracy should not be seen as a fourth branch of government, providing an additional check on the White House. They are unelected but interested parties. Whether members of the civil bureaucracy would be as likely to provide such a check on a president they liked as one they despised is a legitimate question.
Here’s are some questions to which I have no ready answers. How can a president trust the civil bureaucracy? How can a president distinguish between members of the bureaucracy who are acting in their professional capacity and with an abundance of public spirit and those who are acting as partisan operatives? I don’t know how we engineer a continuing civil bureaucracy a president of either party can trust.
I have no opinion on McKusker. Don’t know a thing about her.
I do note your very on point comments in your last paragraph. Trump has been victim of all sorts of internal enemies. He needs to watch his back.
It’s difficult to be high functioning in any group setting – local, state, federal, even in a family – if there is disunity, high jinx among it’s members, disloyalty, subterfuge, mainly aimed to undermine an individual. This has been the environment in which Trump entered the presidency – as the odd man out – and, IMO, has resulted in a chaotic presidency littered with appointment delays/withdrawals and an unusually high turnover of staff.
” I don’t know how we engineer a continuing civil bureaucracy a president of either party can trust.”
Should that even be our goal? Sure, a POTUS probably wants a bureaucracy that will lie for him, cover up for him, commit illegal acts, but is that we want? Besides, they already have the AG to do that. Civil servants should be our employees, not the president’s.
Steve