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Trump’s Sub-Cabinet Men’s Club
Staffing choices reveal much about who’s in the new administration and who’s out
President Trump has been lauded for the speed of his personnel announcements during the just-ended transition. It’s debatable what this indicates exactly, but it’s clearly the case that he moved more quickly than four years earlier, when the Biden-Harris team took more time to choose its cabinet. In each case, though, the incoming administration had chosen the entire cabinet long before the inauguration.
Nevertheless, Trump moved rapidly with his cabinet choices — possibly too quickly with some of those picks who soon had to be replaced.
Speed, though, hasn’t translated into much of a change in the gender breakdown of Trump’s cabinet. The first time around he had just four women in his initial cabinet; this time he’s chosen nine women — still a minority. In comparison, nearly half of Biden’s cabinet — 45% of his initial choices — were women, something those involved in that transition often referred to as a core commitment established by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris immediately after they won.
These comparisons matter, but much of this we’ve known for a while.
As of Monday, we know more about an array of additional personnel choices Trump has made. He announced dozens of sub-cabinet appointments, and the differences with the outgoing administration are just as striking at the cabinet.
Based on the list announced by the White House after the Inauguration — which includes various assistant and deputy secretaries — the gender divide is much worse than at the cabinet-level.
Fewer than 1 in 10 (9%) of Trump’s sub-cabinet picks are women compared to half (50%) of Biden’s initial appointments (based on data collected by Dr. Kathryn Dunn Tempas at Brookings). Just 1 of the 15 directors and acting directors announced by Trump were women.
This is a remarkable difference between the two administrations, as these are the senior officials who actually carry out the President’s agenda, much more so than those in at the secretary level. It also raises another issue: a large number of positions recently held by women will now be by men.
In fact, nearly a majority of the women sub-cabinet appointees in the Biden administration have been replaced by men, such as Todd Blanche replacing Lisa Monaco as the Deputy Attorney General and Mehmet Oz replacing Chiquita Brooks-Laure as the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The data show that a little less than half (43%) of the sub-cabinet positions, Trump has chosen a man to fill a position previously held by a woman.
Another way to look at this is to consider that in just 12 percent of the appointments is the reverse happening: a woman replacing a man, and just 5 percent of the cases — just four positions — is a woman replacing a woman.
What’s to make of this pattern?
Many of these women appointed by Biden were history-makers, the firsts in these positions. First, it would seem, and for the near term only.
There’s also that old saw about “personnel is policy.” If you believe that, and so many in Washington do, then who is chosen to staff the administration matters, and a large gender imbalance is worth considering as well.
It’s hard not to read into these staffing decisions comments made by other Trump appointees, especially Pete Hegseth the likely Secretary of Defense. He recently said “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles.”
There’s much more to say about these staffing patterns, but it should come as no big surprise that among the flurry of executive action issued by the White House, one of the first moves was to discontinue the White House Gender Policy Council established by President Biden.
Both staffing and policy matter, and Trump’s wasted little time showing exactly who and what matters most to him.
