Shortsightedness would continue to prevail on January 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration when, with scant debate, the Senate voted 98–1 to confirm Mattis.
The sole dissenting vote came from New York Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Personnel, who had responded to Trump’s December selection of Mattis with an immediate announcement that “while I deeply respect General Mattis’s service, I will oppose a waiver. Civilian control of our military is a fundamental principle of American democracy, and I will not vote for an exception to this rule.” Gillibrand stuck with that principle. After meeting in early January 2017 with Mattis, the senator said: “He has served our country admirably. He is well-regarded as an extraordinary general, and I am very grateful for that service, and I’m very grateful that he’s willing to continue his service for the president-elect. But I still believe that civilian control of our military is fundamental to the American democracy.”
Gillibrand’s stance was a lonely one. But it will be remembered as one of the most important dissents of the transition to Trump’s presidency. It is easy to rewrite the rules in the moment, to entertain exceptions on the theory that particular requests truly are exceptional. Most Democrats embraced that compromise, as they embraced Mattis. But the senator from New York did not just refuse. She raised the issue again and again. Asked before the final vote to comment on other members of the Senate, including Democrats, who had not joined her in declaring early and consistent opposition to the waiver, Gillibrand replied: “You’ll have to ask them. I just think it’s fundamental to the Constitution.”
— 10 —
THE DEPUTY SECRETARY FOR BOEING
Patrick Shanahan
Deputy Secretary of Defense Designee
Secretary of Defense James Mattis knew who he wanted to have as his second-in-command at the Pentagon: Michèle Flournoy, the former under secretary of defense for policy who served as a principal advisor to Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Leon Panetta during President Obama’s first term. A senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs who serves as CEO of the Center for a New American Security—and whose resume includes work with the Defense Policy Board, the Project on National Security Reform and the Defense Science Board Task Force on Transformation—she was on the cutting edge when it came to thinking about everything from national security to defense spending to the delicate balances that must be achieved to keep the peace and extend it. Had Hillary Clinton been elected president in 2016, Flournoy might herself have become secretary of defense. She had praised Trump’s selection of Mattis (calling him “a much respected military thinker”) for the top post and Mattis very much wanted her on his team. So it was all good.
Or maybe not.
“Flournoy had preliminary conversations with Mattis and went to New York to brief people on the Trump team on her work on defense and National Security Council reform but withdrew her name from any consideration in mid-December,” reported CNN. Why? The key appears to have been that trip to New York to meet with the Trump team. As much as she respected Mattis, Flournoy said, she determined that “he needed a deputy who wouldn’t be struggling every other day about whether they could be part of some of the policies that were likely to take shape.” Translation: she could not see a way to fit into an administration with Donald Trump as the commander in chief.
It was clear that expectations would have to be lowered.
A few weeks later, President Trump named his pick for deputy secretary of defense: Patrick Shanahan, the senior vice president for Supply Chain & Operations at Boeing.
Yes, Boeing, the second-largest U.S. defense contractor after Lockheed Martin Corporation.
Shanahan was tapped to oversee defense policy, the budget and, um, the acquisition teams at the Pentagon. “Shanahan, 54, has no military or political experience,” noted the Seattle Times when the selection was announced in March. “He is, however, familiar with defense procurement from the business side.” Very familiar.
Shanahan worked for many years as the vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, and before that he was general manager for Rotorcraft Systems and U.S. Army Aviation programs.
In other words, if there was a living, breathing embodiment of the military-industrial complex, it was Patrick Shanahan, a thirty-one-year Boeing employee, member of the Boeing executive council and now the guy who will be helping the Pentagon with procurement issues. Shanahan’s defenders pointed out that he was no more of a Republican than was Flournoy; in fact, he had donated to the campaigns of Democrats in the past. And they also noted that ethics rules would require Shanahan to recuse himself from specific involvement with Boeing buys for two years.
But two years out of Boeing does not take the Boeing out of the Boeing exec.
And that was fine by Donald Trump. The president knew exactly what he was doing when he picked Shanahan.
“After a rocky start between the new administration and aerospace giant Boeing,” reported the Seattle Times, “President Donald Trump’s nomination Thursday of senior company executive Pat Shanahan as deputy secretary of defense is the latest sign of an increasingly cozy relationship.” The president had griped back in November 2016 about the cost of the next Air Force One being produced by Boeing. But Boeing chief executive officer Dennis Muilenburg had already flown to Washington and down to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida to work on the relationship.
As the president was announcing the Shanahan nomination, the White House was also announcing a budget blueprint with $13.5 billion in funding proposed for procuring new military aircraft, including $4 billion for Boeing’s F/A-18 fighter jets.
The Washington Post noted that Shanahan’s time with Boeing “might highlight Trump’s propensity to lean on the revolving door of the defense industry and the U.S. military” in making appointments to Pentagon posts. Well, yes, that it might.
— 11 —
DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Mick Mulvaney
Director of the Office of Management and Budget
Donald Trump used his first joint address to the Congress of the United States on February 28, 2017, to engage in an unprecedented flight of fiscal fantasy. Specifically, the president imagined that the United States could cut taxes for wealthy Americans and corporations, rip tens of billions of dollars out of domestic programs (and from diplomacy and climate-change initiatives), hand that money over to the military-industrial complex and somehow remain a functional and genuinely strong nation.
Trump did not articulate this agenda quite so bluntly. The president’s hour-long speech was far more traditional and temperate in character than his ballistic inaugural address. The themes were, for the most part, predictable: “construction of a great wall along our southern border,” “vetting procedures,” “construction of the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines,” “for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated,” “school choice.” The rhetoric was, by the standards of this presidency, disciplined. But the specifics were few. Only toward the end did the president get precise, saying: “I am sending the Congress a budget that rebuilds the military, eliminates the Defense sequester, and calls for one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.”
Trump made little effort to explain how he would pay for that increase, aside from mentioning the fact that he had “placed a hiring freeze on non-military and non-essential Federal workers.” The president let John Michael “Mick” Mulvaney, a wealthy political careerist from South Carolina (elected to the state house in 2006, elected to the state senate in 2008, elected to the U.S. House in 2000, tapped to join Trump’s cabinet as director of the Office of Management and Budget shortly after the 2016 election), do the heavy lifting.
An unblinking, and often unthinking, advocate for domestic austerity budgets even in times of plenty, Mulvaney made a name for
himself as a debt-and-deficits-obsessed congressman who was always on the hunt for an excuse to shut down the federal government. The New York Times noted that Mulvaney took such a hard line against raising the nation’s debt limit that he and his allies embraced “the term ‘Shutdown Caucus’ because of their willingness to shut the government down” instead of passing the routine resolutions that had been approved by past Congresses with nary a notice. If Mulvaney could not find a fiscal argument for a shutdown during Barack Obama’s tenure, he would come up with something else: like that time in 2015 when he opposed a compromise plan to keep the government up and running because it included funding for Planned Parenthood.
Mulvaney was so far out on the fiscal fringe that he backed libertarian-leaning Kentucky Senator Rand Paul for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, which fed the concerns of hawkish senators like Arizona Republican John McCain that Mulvaney might be a bit too open to imposing mild restraints on Department of Defense spending. (McCain needn’t have worried, as would soon become evident.)
After Paul’s campaign fizzled, Mulvaney jumped on board the Trump train. Trump and Mulvaney had some things in common; for instance, Mulvaney had tried his hand at real-estate development. And, as with Trump, it had not always gone well. During his first campaign for Congress, local papers were filled with reports of how “Republican U.S. House candidate Mick Mulvaney is fending off questions over his role in a housing development plagued by financial and environmental problems.”
A television ad from the campaign of the man Mulvaney was challenging, then–House Budget Committee chairman John Spratt, summed up the complaint: “Mick Mulvaney convinced Lancaster County to approve $30 million in bonds to improve this property. Then Mulvaney flipped the property for a $7 million profit to another developer who had defaulted on a $78 million loan.” Mulvaney called the charges “outrageous” and claimed, with a Trumpian twist, that Democratic policies were to blame for anything that went awry with the deal. Then Stanley Smith, a Lancaster County council representative, recounted details of the so-called Edenmoor deal in the local papers, declaring that “we trusted Mick, and we shouldn’t have. Now that Edenmoor is an 800-acre polluted wasteland with over $5 million in unpaid property taxes, Mick Mulvaney says it’s not his problem. He has walked away and says that people need to understand that that’s how business is done. I am a Republican, but I cannot bring myself to vote for a man like Senator Mulvaney who thinks it’s okay to take advantage of people and use government for his own personal gain.”
That might have put a roadblock in the way of Mulvaney’s ambitions in some election years. But in the Republican-wave year of 2010, he prevailed with relative ease and made his way to Congress. Mulvaney quickly made a name for himself as one of the fiercest of the right-wing Freedom Caucus’s fiscal hawks. He posted on Facebook about “the best question: do we really need government-funded research at all?” and anticipated the “alternative facts” era by responding to numbers he did not like by claiming that the Department of Labor manipulated unemployment statistics. (As a member of the Trump administration, he was back at it, griping that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office might not be up to assessing large pieces of legislation like the Republican “repeal and replace” answer to the Affordable Care Act.)
When Trump tapped Mulvaney for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), there were still a few romantics who imagined that the new president might keep some of his big-spending campaign promises. For them, the Mulvaney pick made no sense. Headlines warned that “Trump promised to save entitlements. His budget director pick wants him to break his vow.” In fact, Trump’s selection of Mulvaney was a signal that the president was not going to be keeping a lot of promises. The Mulvaney pick tipped the balance toward the Steve Bannon wing of the White House, which combined a determination to pursue both the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the construction of unprecedented military power for the real and imagined wars to come. Trump in transition became what Trump as a candidate had rarely been: a fiscal “hawk” who fretted that “we are nearly $20 trillion in debt” while pointing to Mulvaney as “a very high-energy leader with deep convictions for how to responsibly manage our nation’s finances and save our country from drowning in red ink.”
Trump promised his administration would make “smart choices” with Mulvaney helming the OMB. In fact, Trump and the people around him knew that Mulvaney, the career ladder–climbing candidate from South Carolina, would make political choices.
That was hinted at in Trump’s speech to Congress and confirmed a few weeks later, when Mulvaney released a budget blueprint proposal that asked Congress for a $54 billion increase in Pentagon spending—a 10 percent hike over the previous fiscal year’s budget—and a 6 percent increase for the Mexican border wall–building Department of Homeland Security. At the same time, the budget projected no increase in the deficit, making it appealing to at least some of Mulvaney’s old friends from the House Freedom Caucus. How was this fiscal fête achieved? By pretty much gutting everything else. Seriously—CNN ran a list of the cuts:
· Health and Human Services, the department responsible for implementing Obamacare and its proposed repeal, would face a $12.6 billion cut—a 16.2% decrease.
· Environmental Protection Agency: $2.6 billion, or 31.4%.
· State Department: $11 billion, or 28.7%.
· Labor Department: $2.5 billion, or 20.7%.
· Agriculture Department: $5 billion, or 20.7%.
· US Army Corps of Engineers: $1 billion, a 16.3% cut.
· Cuts National Institutes of Health spending by $5.8 billion, a nearly 20% cut. Also overhauls NIH to focus on “highest priority” efforts and eliminates the Fogarty International Center.
· Other double-digit cuts include Commerce at 15.7%; Education at 13.5%; Housing and Urban Development at 13.2%; Transportation at 12.7%, and Interior at 11.7%.
Targeted for elimination were Community Service Block Grants that fund programs such as Meals on Wheels, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Global Climate Change Initiative, the Legal Services Corporation, the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and dozens of Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education programs and initiatives. Funding for Amtrak was cut, as was funding for the Clean Power Plan and for payments to fund United Nations climate change initiatives. “I think the President was fairly straightforward—we’re not spending money on that anymore; we consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that,” announced Mulvaney, when asked about programs to address climate change.
The OMB director explained, with a straight face, that cuts to Meals on Wheels and Head Start programs weren’t hard-hearted at all. “I think it’s probably one of the most compassionate things we can do,” said Mulvaney, who argued that it was “fairly compassionate” to refuse to fund programs “unless we can guarantee to you that that money is actually being used in a proper function.”
“Meals on Wheels sounds great,” Mulvaney told the White House press corps. But, he said, “we’re not going to spend [money] on programs that cannot show that they actually deliver the promises that we’ve made to people.”
Actually, it is Meals on Wheels that delivers on promises, in the form of hot meals and a friendly check-in for millions of elderly Americans in small towns and big cities across the United States. “Cuts of any kind to these highly successful and leveraged programs would be a devastating blow to our ability to provide much-needed care for millions of vulnerable seniors in America, which in turn saves billions of dollars in reduced healthcare expenses,” explained Ellie Hollander, president and CEO of Meals on Wheels America.
Virtually all of the cuts proposed by Trump and Mulvaney assault the social fabric of America. So over-the-top was the plan that, when the president in early May signed a $1 trillion spending bill to keep the government operating through September, few of the
proposals for draconian domestic cuts were included. But the “compromise” did include a dramatic increase in the allocation for the Pentagon, up $15 billion. So it wasn’t like Trump had abandoned the initial plan. He had merely delayed some of the uglier slashing and burning at home in order to avert an embarrassing government shutdown at the close of his first hundred days in office. Mulvaney was still on the case, peddling what serious legislators identified as an immoral agenda.
“It’s said that a budget is a statement of values,” explained Oregon senator Jeff Merkley when describing the spending priorities that Trump and Mulvaney outlined initially and that the OMB director continued to promote as the year went on. “If so, this budget makes it perfectly clear that the Trump Administration values special interests and defense contractors over American middle-class families.”
Merkley identifies Mulvaney’s plan as “an attack on our families’ most essential needs, from the clean air and water we breathe and drink, to the schools our kids attend, to the very investments that create American jobs.”
Describing the budget blueprint as “morally bankrupt,” California congresswoman Barbara Lee says: “This budget would offer massive handouts to defense contractors while gutting lifesaving programs for the poor and middle class. Despite the rampant waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, this budget funnels even more taxpayer money into the pockets of defense contractors. Rather than make us safer, this budget outline is a recipe for greater instability, hunger and hopelessness around the world. By cutting the Department of State and USAID by more than $10 billion, the Trump Administration is undermining our global leadership and sentencing families around the world to poverty and illness.”