NOTE: Since this article was published, Dr. Ronny Jackson pulled his nomination and is no longer the White House physician.
The following article by James Hohmann with Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve was posted on the Washington Post website April 24, 2018:
THE BIG IDEA:
President Trump promises “extreme vetting” of all immigrants, but he has repeatedly failed to hold his own Cabinet picks, senior White House staff and judicial nominees to the same standard. Ronny L. Jackson’s imperiled nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs is just the latest example.
Senate lawmakers postponed the White House doctor’s confirmation hearing last night after top Republicans and Democrats raised concerns about his qualifications and oversight of the White House medical staff.
Jackson’s Wednesday hearing before the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs was set to be brutal because several lawmakers fear he lacks the experience to lead an agency with 360,000 employees and an annual budget of $186 billion. They’re also frustrated that Trump sprung the pick on them without advance consultation, and that Jackson did not go through a formal vetting process. It’s unclear whether it will be rescheduled.
A lack of due diligence is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpism. Trump promised to hire “the best and most serious people” as a candidate, but there’s been historically high turnover, an enormous number of withdrawn nominations and many of his appointees who made it through now operate under clouds of scandal. The Rob Porter fiasco spotlighted how many people were operating at the highest levels of government with interim security clearances and incomplete background checks.
— CBS News reports that Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the top Democrat on the Veterans’ Affairs committee, is reviewing multiple allegations he’s heard from current and former White House medical staff that Jackson created a “hostile work environment.” The accusations include excessive drinking on the job and improperly dispensing medication, per Ed O’Keefe and Nancy Cordes. “The other people familiar with the stories also confirmed those details. If proven true, ‘it’ll sink his nomination,’ said one of the sources. Tester’s office began hearing the allegations from current and former employees in the last several days and over the weekend … Some — though not all — of the seven Democratic senators on Veterans’ Affairs Committee met Monday evening to discuss what to do about the allegations.”
— “The White House also is assessing whether questions that have been raised about Jackson have validity,” our Seung Min Kim, Lisa Rein and Josh Dawsey report. “Three White House officials said Monday that they worried the nomination was in peril.”
In recent days, they scoop, committee Chairman Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) called the White House to express his concern that Jackson was unqualified. He vouched instead for his former top aide Thomas Bowman, who is currently VA’s deputy secretary.
— The aforementioned allegations, which are apparently coming at least partly from people who literally work at the White House, would normally come out as part of routine vetting for any Cabinet secretary. But this has been a constant struggle since Trump took office. Recall Andy Puzder’s failed nominationto be secretary of labor. Several Trump nominees who couldn’t get through the Republican-controlled Senate still work in government because they were shifted into jobs that don’t require confirmation.
In his rush to remake the courts, Trump has put up many people for judgeships who would have been very unlikely to get nominated if they went through a more rigorous vetting process. There was the guy in Alabama who had defended the Ku Klux Klan, the guy in Texas who said transgender children are proof that “Satan’s plan is working,” and the nominee for the U.S. Court of Federal Claims who called Justice Anthony Kennedy “a judicial prostitute.”
— The Presidential Personnel Office, the White House office responsible for vetting political appointees, has suffered from chaos, dysfunction and nepotism under the leadership of young and inexperienced Trump loyalists who seem to enjoy partying more than working. Investigative reporters Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg wrote about what’s happening three weeks ago: “[T]wo office leaders have spotty records themselves: a college dropout with arrests for drunken driving and bad checks and a Marine Corps reservist with arrests for assault, disorderly conduct, fleeing an officer and underage drinking. … Under President Trump, the office was launched with far fewer people than in prior administrations. It has served as a refuge for young campaign workers, a stopover for senior officials on their way to other posts and a source of jobs for friends and family … One senior staffer has had four relatives receive appointments through the office.
“From the start, the office struggled to keep pace with its enormous responsibilities, with only about 30 employees on hand, less than a third of the staffing in prior administrations … Since the inauguration, most of the staffers in the PPO have been in their 20s, some with little professional experience apart from their work on Trump’s campaign … Even as the demands to fill government mounted, the PPO offices on the first floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building became something of a social hub, where young staffers from throughout the administration stopped by to hang out on couches and smoke electronic cigarettes, known as vaping, current and former White House officials said.
“PPO leaders hosted happy hours last year in their offices that included beer, wine and snacks … In January, they played a drinking game in the office called ‘Icing’ to celebrate the deputy director’s 30th birthday. Icing involves hiding a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, a flavored malt liquor, and demanding that the person who discovers it, in this case the deputy director, guzzle it.”
— The disregard for serious vetting can be traced back to the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election. When Trump fired Chris Christie as the head of his transition team on Nov. 11, after the then-New Jersey governor expressed opposition to hiring Michael Flynn as national security adviser, Flynn and Steve Bannon, who would be White House chief strategist, celebrated by tossing binders full of potential personnel picks into the trash, according to a Politico report last year.
Christie lamented earlier this month that people like Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator now embroiled in controversies over his spending and management practices, would never have gotten tapped if he had stuck around.
“This was a brutally unprofessional transition,” Christie said. “This was a transition that didn’t vet people for this type of judgment issues. … If Mr. Pruitt’s going to go, it’s because he never should’ve been there in the first place.”