(Quin Hillyer, Liberty Headlines) Draining a swamp – as candidate Trump metaphorically said he wanted to do to Washington’s fetid bureaucracy – requires manpower to get rid of all the muck.

But various factions on the right are increasingly concerned with the slow and/or uneven pace, and direction, of the Trump Administration’s placement of personnel within executive departments to do the hard work of reform.

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Politico on Monday lent credence to earlier reports that one reason for the slow pace of executive appointments – more on those numbers in a moment – is that different right-leaning factions exist, and they disagree about who is in charge.

Many, perhaps most, of Trump’s Cabinet appointments were greeted with acclaim from most of the otherwise semi-warring factions on the right. Most of Trump’s conservative supporters also were thrilled that Trump was so aggressive about appointing “landing teams” of mostly conservative staffers to help oversee the transition of executive agencies to new management.

But what didn’t mesh, according to numerous reports long before the new Politico story, were the combinations of the landing teams and the Cabinet picks.

The problem, say the reports, is that the Cabinet secretaries had little or no role in choosing their own transition teams – and some of those landing team members were not experienced hands in their particular agencies’ subject areas, but rather – to quote Politico – “mostly young Trump campaign aides with little experience in government.” Result, as per the May 1 report:

“These White House-installed chaperones have often clashed with the Cabinet secretaries they were assigned to monitor…. The tensions have escalated for weeks, prompting a recent meeting among Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and other administration officials.”

With the landing teams and the Cabinet secretaries pulling in different directions, and with Trump himself accustomed to dealing with only a small inner circle and thus perhaps not as attuned to the importance of filling the federal bureaucracy with as many like-minded appointees as possible, conservative grumbling has grown for weeks about the hundreds of empty positions in federal departments that are a new president’s prerogative to fill.

[The story continues here.]

 

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