NEWSWEEK
It's generally been a no-no to appoint a CEO or union leader to a presidential cabinet, until now.
Alabama Senator Jeff
Sessions with Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York City, October 7.MIKE
SEGAR/REUTERS
A lot was written during the
presidential campaign about the end of norms. It was a norm for a presidential
candidate to release his or her taxes; now it isn’t. It was a norm to divest
one’s assets and put them in a blind trust; now it isn’t. It was a norm for a
president-elect to sit through daily or almost daily intelligence briefings;
now it isn’t.
To understand the new ground
that Donald Trump is plowing in terms of his cabinet, look at the Labor Department. The department was established more than 100 years
ago under President Howard Taft, a Republican, to separate
the labor bureau from the business-oriented Commerce Department, in part to
assuage the concerns of a growing union movement. A single secretary of
labor and commerce, one union leader said, “was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Taft was no fan of the
department, but he reluctantly signed the law anyway during his last hours in
office.
In the century since, the
department’s responsibilities have grown to cover everything from compiling
labor statistics to ensuring mine safety to overseeing the nation’s pension
programs. When it comes to appointing labor secretaries, there’s been an
unwritten rule: Democrats don’t appoint union leaders and Republicans don’t
appoint CEOs.
So, the job generally has been filled by politicians:
George H.W. Bush appointed Rep. Lynn Martin, an Illinois moderate, and Barack Obama gave it to
Rep. Hilda Solis of California. Or academics: Nixon appointed George Shultz and Bill Clinton
appointed Robert Reich. There have also been government officials with
business backgrounds, like Elaine Chao and Elizabeth Dole, as well as some businessmen, including Ray Donovan, a New Jersey
construction executive (not the TV show).
It’s generally been a no-no to appointing a CEO or
union leader; until now
The president-elect’s
choice to head the department is Andrew Puzder, the CEO of CKE Enterprises, a restaurant chain that includes Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. It’s telling that
the chain is owned by Roark Capital, a private equity concern that was named after Howard Roark, the protagonist of The Fountainhead, written by Ayn Rand. In the novel, Roark is the heroic architect and
builder of a skyscraper who is forever being stymied by moochers and takers, Rand was a hero to libertarians, who treat her
attacks on government benefits as scripture. Puzder reportedly enjoys reading
Rand in his spare time, and that makes sense when one learns he opposes the
Obama administration’s efforts to raise it the minimum wage as well as its
plans to expand overtime benefits.
To be fair, most any
labor secretary appointed by a Republican president was bound to oppose his
Democratic predecessor’s policies. But Puzder has praised automation that
displaces restaurant workers and has been an active opponent to efforts that
would make the parent companies of franchisees open to lawsuits. We can’t be
sure exactly how he will manage the $12 billion department or its 17,000
employees if confirmed. His ex-wife had accused Pudzel of spousal abuse, but
she has recently rescinded that charge via a letter distributed by the Trump
transition team. Perhaps Puzder will prove to be the practical-minded
businessman that supporters insist he is, but given his positions and the
startling choice of a CEO as labor secretary, expect a more dramatic lurch to
the right than anything seen under the Bush presidencies.
During the presidential
campaign, there was always considerable wonder as to what Trump’s governing
philosophy would be. After all, it was only a few years ago that he was
praising the Clintons, donating to their foundation and denouncing “wackos” like Pat Buchanan, the Nixon/Reagan
official turned commentator who ran for president on a platform of restricting
immigration and erecting tariff barriers. Many wondered whether Trump was
really a Republican, He broke with his party’s orthodoxy on trade and
immigration, but he also offered succor to liberals and his working-class base
when he said he would never touch Medicare and Social Security. Now every indication is that Trump will govern as a
very conservative Republican, kind of a Ted Cruz who tweets.
Bill Bennett, who was education secretary under Ronald Reagan, has
called Trump’s cabinet picks the most conservative ever. And that’s hard to
dispute. Trump said he doesn’t want to touch entitlements, but his choice for
secretary of health and human services, Tom Price, a Republican congressman from Georgia and a
physician, is a believer in making Medicare a voucher system, transforming it
from an insurance program that offers a defined set of hospital, physician and
prescription benefits into a “premium support” program under which the
elderly are given a subsidy to buy private insurance.
As for Medicaid, the
government health program for lower-income Americans, he’s favored turning it
over to the states. This is far to the right of anything pursued by George W.
Bush, who actually expanded Medicare more than any president since Lyndon
Johnson when he proposed and passed a prescription drug benefit. Maybe Marco Rubio or Carly Fiorina would have
appointed Price, a House leader on health care, but this is not the hands-off
Medicare policy that Trump promised.
Trump’s nomination of Scott Pruitt to be administrator of
the Environmental Protection Agency is unlike any since the first days of the
Reagan administration. George W.. Bush appointed moderate New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman to be his first EPA head. His father appointed William Reilly, then head of the World Wildlife Fund. Pruitt, the attorney general of
Oklahoma, is a climate change denier who became infamous for having written a
letter of complaint to the EPA about what he said was an overestimation of
pollution figures for his state. The letter, it emerged, was written by staff
at Devon Energy. Any Republican was going to
shift Obama’s policies on climate change, although it’s worth remembering that
Senator John McCain used to talk about climate change and supported
cap-and-trade measures to stem it. The EPA has never seen an administrator so
fundamentally hostile to its mission. It’s the environmental equivalent of
handing the Labor Department to Puzder.
At the Education Department,
the appointment of Betsy DeVos marks a turning
point—she would be the first education secretary who has never attended public
school nor has their children. DeVos is a fierce advocate for offering vouchers to allow parents to send
their children to private schools. The idea has wide currency among Republicans
and some Democrats alarmed at the state of some poorer school districts. Most
Republican secretaries of education, such as Lamar Alexander and Margaret
Spellings, have recognized the political realities of trying to institute a
national voucher program and have instead focused on choice within the public
school system and the creation of charter schools. The Obama administration has
largely continued this idea, albeit in a way more friendly to the American
Federation of Teachers and other education unions. But Trump hasn’t talked
charter schools so much as total take-it-anywhere-you-want vouchers, and DeVos
will pursue that idea as well as ripping up the common core standards developed
by states and private industry during the Bush years.
Likewise, Senator Jeff
Sessions of Alabama, Trump’s pick to be attorney general, can be expected to
carry over all of the most controversial policies of the Bush-Obama years when
it comes to surveillance and civil liberties. But as the Senate’s leading
advocate of restricting immigration, legal and illegal, he’ll take the
department in a direction that it never saw under the last two Republican
attorneys general, John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales. Concerns over Sessions’s
commitment to civil rights as U.S. attorney in Alabama led to his being denied
a federal judgeship by the Senate in 1986. In modern times, no president has
nominated an attorney general who had previously been rejected by the Senate
for a post.
It’s not that every proposed
member of the Trump cabinet represents a dramatic shift to the right. Some are
ciphers. Nikki Haley, the amiable governor of
South Carolina who Trump has nominated to be America’s ambassador to the United
Nations, has never lived outside South Carolina. Who knows whether she’ll be a firebreather like John Bolton, George W. Bush’s
representative to the body, or more moderate, like his successor Thomas
Pickering, an esteemed career diplomat? James Mattis, the retired general tapped
to be defense secretary, and John Kelly, the general picked to be
homeland security secretary, don’t represent dramatic swings to the right.
(Obama appointed no fewer than two Republicans to be defense secretary, Chuck
Hagel and Bob Gates.)
In general, though, this is
shaping up as the most conservative cabinet ever. It’ll also be the richest,
with at least $14 billion in personal wealth. Depending on where you sit,
that’s a good or a bad thing. But it’s a much more solidly conservative
Republican assemblage than Trump intimated he’d pursue during the campaign.
Unless our protean president does another flip, we now know who he is.
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