The Trump Administration: Home Alone or Abandoned?

In a March 3rd New York Times Opinion piece, “Home Alone in the Trump Administration”, the Times Editorial Board took issue with the fact that “President Trump has appointed fewer than three dozen of the top 1,000 officials he needs to run the federal government.” The Board described this lapse alternatively as a byproduct of the President’s “mom and pop” managerial style, his inattentiveness, or a simple loss of interest.

However, the Editorial Board dismisses recent statements by the administration, including this by the President:

“In many cases, we don’t want to fill those jobs,” he said on Fox News this week. “What do all these people do? You don’t need all those jobs.”

The Board also fails to note Trump Senior Advisor Steve Bannon’s comments at CPAC describing the top priorities of the new regime, including the “deconstruction of the administrative state”.

While the Times Editorial Board lays out a biting critique of the Trump administration’s hiring processes—rife with cronyism and prizing loyalty and politics over competence and experience — they are too quick to dismiss what the administration, and Mr. Bannon in particular, have been clear about: the “empty desks” at the Treasury and State Departments are empty by design. They are a feature, not a bug, of this administration.

If the goals of the Trump administration include the hollowing of the federal bureaucracy (including massive proposed cuts to the Department of State and the Environmental Protection Agency, and a federal hiring freeze), the President need not kill it outright. He can simply starve it, and watch it wither and die.

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