Lifting the Veil on Another Batch of Shadowy Trump Appointees

[babylonsister]

https://www.propublica.org/article/lifting-the-veil-on-another-batch-of-shadowy-trump-appointees?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1504308104

Lifting the Veil on Another Batch of Shadowy Trump Appointees
The administration continues to quietly hire political staffers — more than 1,000 so far, many of them regulating industries they previously worked for — but we’ve uncovered more identities. “The swamp continues,” says a Trump campaign official who is now a lobbyist.

by Derek Kravitz, Isaac Arnsdorf and Marina Affo Aug. 31, 12:48 p.m. EDT



President Donald Trump has left hundreds of government jobs unfilled that require a vote by the Senate. Yet his administration has installed more than 1,000 people through political appointments at every major federal agency, handing over control of the government’s day-to-day operations to industry insiders and loyalists to an unprecedented degree.

Among the latest Trump administration appointees is a lobbyist who until March worked for a leading hepatitis C drugmaker that priced its treatment at $1,000 a pill and is now leading a White House working group setting drug pricing policies. The list includes the new head of the government’s offshore oil drilling safety and enforcement agency, who previously sat on the board of Sunoco Logistics and who told an industry conference earlier this month that deepwater drilling should ramp up. Then there’s the Hollywood actor who has called global warming and climate change a “leftist political tool” and “not sound science” on Twitter and who is now the communications director at the Department of Health and Human Services. Finally, this group also includes the 80-year-old retired chief legal officer of Morgan Stanley, who once told government lawyers he was “going to kick your ass” and is now a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, overseeing litigation while his boss awaits Senate confirmation. (At the time, Kempf denied using the expletive in exactly those terms.)

These political appointees, some of them members of what have been dubbed “beachhead teams” during the presidential transition, and others who are now permanent employees, don’t need Senate confirmation. Many of them have operated in the shadows and the White House has declined to publicly reveal their identities. Some political appointees, such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s chief of staff, Wendy Teramoto, were initially hired as special government employees, or SGEs. They are brought on as temporary advisers and don’t face the same rules that other federal employees do. But Teramoto and others have stuck around, and been promoted to permanent jobs. The administration reveals virtually nothing about this category of staffers.

“As long as you know who to call, they are more than willing to work with ‘industry,’” said Scott Mason, a Trump campaign veteran who’s now a lobbyist with Holland & Knight. “The swamp continues as the ecosystem it has always been, advocating on behalf of Americans who are all represented in one way or another by an interest group.”

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“What’s unusual is the size and scope of these teams,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, which advises both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations on transitions. “The normal process in filling your political team is going from the campaign to the transition team to a political appointment. The cabinet picks manage all of this. But without them, the beachhead teams have been in charge. It’s added a whole other level of confusion to an already difficult process.”

It has also added a layer of shadows, said Jeff Hauser, who runs the Revolving Door Project at the D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. “These are political appointees who are subjected to much less scrutiny than if they went through the Senate-confirmed process,” he said. “And these special employees, many of whom are on short stints and go back to regulated industries, are not answerable to anyone except the White House. It’s an outsourcing of government.”

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Jonathan Galaviz was hired as an adviser at the State Department's Office of Security, Democracy and Human Rights, on June 11. He has consulted for foreign governments, including Russian state-run investment firms, helping with a host of gaming industry issues. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Alexander Fitzsimmons was appointed chief of staff and senior adviser at the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. He came to government from the advocacy group American Energy Alliance and Fueling U.S. Forward, a public relations group supporting fossil fuels. Both organizations are backed by Koch Industries and they called for the elimination of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in 2015.

https://www.propublica.org/article/lifting-the-veil-on-another-batch-of-shadowy-trump-appointees?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1504308104

[enough]

1. Great article. We need to be paying attention to what's actually going on

in the government day-to-day, not just to the scandals and absurdities that may bring Trump down. This stuff will not end if Trump is removed. This is what Republicans want to do to the government, and they are succeeding.

[secondwind]

2. Not to mention all the federal judgeships that he is filling ..... quietly.