Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

After three months, Trump still has no nominees for 500 top-level government posts

By Hunter
Wednesday Apr 26, 2017 · 8:00 PM CST

If there is any sliver of good news in the election of a faux-populism-slinging far-right nationalist with authoritarian presumptions about what he'll be doing to our government, it's that he's incompetent.
[ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/slow-pace-of-trump-nominations-leaves-cabinet-agencies-stuck-in-staffing-limbo/2017/04/25/0a150aba-252c-11e7-b503-9d616bd5a305_story.html?utm_term=.8d56a86d7bb4 ]

President Trump’s Cabinet secretaries are growing exasperated at how slowly the White House is moving to fill hundreds of top-tier posts, warning that the vacancies are hobbling efforts to oversee agency operations and promote the president’s agenda, according to administration officials, lawmakers and lobbyists.

The Senate has confirmed 26 of Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and other top posts. But for 530 other vacant senior-level jobs requiring Senate confirmation, the president has advanced just 37 nominees, according to data tracked by The Washington Post and the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service’s Center for Presidential Transition.

If this bozo had even the slightest capacity to surround himself with competent people, democracy in this nation would be in a world of hurt; instead he's filled up what positions he can with either campaign-trail suck-ups or People He Saw On His Teevee, and now that he's run out of both the rest of the appointments are moving at a snail's pace. Breitbart only has so many white nationalists to contribute; Fox News has only so many "analysts." We're getting to the point where the Fox & Friends team may have to do double-duty as Rex Tillerson's entire staff.

The Post identifies no less than five White House figures who hold the ability to nix hires, from Bannon to Kushner to Priebus, with Ivanka Trump sitting in on the process "when a hiring decision piques her interest," because of course she does. That means prospective hires have to have demonstrated past loyalties to at least two opposing administration blocs before even getting to the point where their fealty to Trump himself can be measured, and that's discounting hires nixed on ethical (snicker) grounds and all of the people who turn the White House down because they don't want to try to meet government ethics standards and/or work for a government that so transparently doesn’t know what the hell it is doing.

So they're boned, just as they were a month ago and the month before that. Nobody credible wants to work under Steve Freaking Bannon; nobody Steve Freaking Bannon wants to bring on can pass the credibility test. The cabinet appointees are grousing in public and in private about the delays but can't do anything about them; Trump himself has apparently no interest in the process himself, so he'll just be letting the White House team fight it out indefinitely or until one side or the other finally gets fired.

Let's hear it for Trump's paranoia and rank incompetence, then. At least it's moderating the effects of his stupidity.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/4/26/1656477/-After-three-months-Trump-still-has-no-nominees-for-500-top-level-government-posts#read-more