It’s clichéd but true that personnel is policy. The kinds of people a president chooses to helm the machinery of government are usually far more important to deciding the direction of an administration than that president’s rhetoric. And unknown appointees in obscure posts can sometimes be more influential than big names in flashy positions. Just think of the way Dick Cheney dominated George W. Bush’s administration by installing allies in crucial but little-known offices.
A handful of lower-level appointees announced back in February for precisely one of those offices — Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the key White House agency led by Project 2025 architect Russel Vought — may help explain both what the Trump administration is currently doing and where it’s headed in the future, given Vought and the OMB’s expanded and prominent role in pursuing Trump’s agenda. This list of appointees suggests the president’s agenda will, with a few notable exceptions, include more spending cuts and privatization, state-enforced social conservatism, handouts for the rich, and ratcheting up tensions with China.
Among the more surprising picks are a Kennedy who made a name by opposing forever wars, a conservative judge who favors treatment over jail time for drug offenders, and a Ralph Nader relative who spent decades fighting agricultural monopolies and corporate-friendly trade deals.
But the vast majority offer little to no break from not just the previous Republican administrations that Trump claimed to be leaving behind, but from Washington business as usual more broadly: a welfare expert focused on throwing people off government benefits, an antiabortion lobbyist who wants to one day go after in vitro…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
