Trump says he won’t fill ‘a lot’ of vacant appointments
The WaPo vacancy database is pretty devastating
Tensions Rise Between Tillerson And Trump As The Threat Of War In N. Korea Looms
New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins says Sec. of State Rex Tillerson is a diplomat in an administration that doesn’t value diplomacy: “Rex is a sober, steady guy, and the president is anything but that.” Tillerson’s legacy at Exxon, where he became CEO in 2006, his strategies today in dealing with North Korea and Iran and how he’s presiding over a State Department in which most key positions remain unfilled.
I do know that Tillerson and Mattis talk a lot, and they have a lot of respect for each other. And I think that they – you know, they talk a lot because it’s – they both deal with foreign affairs. And, you know, one is the carrot, and the other is the stick. And they’re trying to coordinate a lot. So they talk a lot. And so it wouldn’t surprise me if that were the case.
One of the things we’re going to focus on is North Korea and the possibility of the escalating rhetoric actually leading to a war. Filkins’s previous article for The New Yorker was about Secretary of Defense General James Mattis, who Filkins first met when he was reporting on the war in Iraq. Filkins covered the war for The New York Times. He’s now a staff writer at The New Yorker covering foreign affairs.
FILKINS: Well, I think the carrot’s getting smaller. I mean – and I think that’s the concern. And the hammer or the stick is getting bigger. And so if you look at their respective budgets, the Office of Management and Budget, which has drawn up the proposed budget for 2018 – for next year – which is what they’re fighting about right now – they would cut the State Department’s budget by 30 percent. And that’s about – the State Department is – the budget’s about – right now about $55 billion a year. And they are proposing – at the same time that they’re cutting the State Department by 30 percent, they’re proposing a $50 billion increase for the Pentagon. So they’re – the proposal on the table right now is to increase spending on defense as much as, or nearly as much as, the entire budget for the State Department.
And so if you stand back and think about that, what does that mean for American foreign policy? You know, you’ve got the guns over here, and you’ve got the diplomats over here. And they are cutting the resources for the diplomats, and they’re giving more resources to the guys with guns. And so I think that’s what’s disturbing to a lot of people right now – that the balance is changing.
GROSS: But Tillerson seems to be one of the people leading the charge in dismantling the State Department. I mean, you write that there are, like, 48 ambassadorships that are vacant. Twenty-one out of 23 assistant secretary positions are vacant or occupied by provisional employees because Congress hasn’t confirmed appointees to the position. How much of this is intentional on Rex Tillerson’s part?
FILKINS: Well, I – that there – I think there’s two answers to that question.
“I’m generally not going to make a lot of the appointments that would normally be — because you don’t need them,” Trump told Forbes in an interview published Tuesday.
“I mean, you look at some of these agencies, how massive they are, and it’s totally unnecessary. They have hundreds of thousands of people,” he added.
Only 142 of the president’s nominees have received Senate confirmation, while 165 others who have been formally nominated are still waiting to be confirmed by the upper chamber, according to a database jointly run by The Washington Post and the Partnership for Public Service that tracks “roughly 600 key executive branch nominations through the confirmation process.”
That number, however, is only about half of the total number of positions that require Senate confirmation.