10-11-2016, 10:31 PM
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/20...-jobs.html
President-elect Donald Trump is scrambling to line up senior officials to run the government's sprawling intelligence and homeland security bureaucracy.
Team Trump is struggling to fill numerous key slots or even attract many candidates because hundreds have either sworn they'd never work in a Trump administration or have directly turned down requests to join, multiple current and former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the transition efforts told The Daily Beast.
Team Trump didn't expect to win until the campaign's internal polling a month before the election signaled a possible victory. That's when senior Trump officials went into overdrive, trying to build a bench of experienced national security candidates with top secret clearances willing to work for a Trump presidencyand they met resistance across the landscape of experienced GOP national security professionals.
One person who met last month with Trump's national security and homeland security transition team leader said that she confessed that many candidates had flatly rejected attempts to recruit them, believing that Trump was unfit to hold the office of commander in chief.
"She said that it was going to be very difficult to fill positions in that space because everybody that had experience was a never-Trumper," this person said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
"She wasn't even sure that she was going to be able to fill a transition team," much less find people to serve in government positions, this person said.
"In theory, 20 people are supposed to parachute into the Department of Homeland Security [during the transition between administrations]. And I don't think they have anybody to do it."
A second individual, also speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed this person's account that there are a large number of vacancies to fill without a clear plan of how that will happen. Since Trump's improbable win, Team Trump has been aggressively reaching out to possible candidates with a flurry of meetings in New York and Washington, D.C.
Two career U.S. officials, currently serving in the government, also said they were unsure whether they would continue in their positions, which are slated to last into the next administration.
On Monday morning, a group of officials working on a range of national security issues including the resettlement of refugees and methods for countering terrorists' violent rhetoric met to discuss their progress. But it wasn't at all clear whether a President Trump would even continue those initiatives, one participant said. Trump has promised to ban Muslims from certain countries from entering the United States and has claimed he knows better how to combat terrorists than military generals and intelligence officials.
But before he can take the axe to Obama-era programs, Trump has to staff up his own administration. It won't be easy.
It was clear the Trump team would have trouble staffing their national security bench nine months ago, when more than 100 Republican national security leaders signed an open letter vowing not to support him as the GOP nominee and "working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office."
"Everybody who has signed a never-Trump letter or indicated an anti-Trump attitude is not going to get a job. And that's most of the Republican foreign policy, national security, intelligence, homeland security, and Department of Justice experience," Paul Rosenzweig, who held a senior position at the Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration, told The Daily Beast. (Bush told reporters on Tuesday that neither he nor his wife, Laura, cast a vote for president.)
President-elect Donald Trump is scrambling to line up senior officials to run the government's sprawling intelligence and homeland security bureaucracy.
Team Trump is struggling to fill numerous key slots or even attract many candidates because hundreds have either sworn they'd never work in a Trump administration or have directly turned down requests to join, multiple current and former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the transition efforts told The Daily Beast.
Team Trump didn't expect to win until the campaign's internal polling a month before the election signaled a possible victory. That's when senior Trump officials went into overdrive, trying to build a bench of experienced national security candidates with top secret clearances willing to work for a Trump presidencyand they met resistance across the landscape of experienced GOP national security professionals.
One person who met last month with Trump's national security and homeland security transition team leader said that she confessed that many candidates had flatly rejected attempts to recruit them, believing that Trump was unfit to hold the office of commander in chief.
"She said that it was going to be very difficult to fill positions in that space because everybody that had experience was a never-Trumper," this person said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
"She wasn't even sure that she was going to be able to fill a transition team," much less find people to serve in government positions, this person said.
"In theory, 20 people are supposed to parachute into the Department of Homeland Security [during the transition between administrations]. And I don't think they have anybody to do it."
A second individual, also speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed this person's account that there are a large number of vacancies to fill without a clear plan of how that will happen. Since Trump's improbable win, Team Trump has been aggressively reaching out to possible candidates with a flurry of meetings in New York and Washington, D.C.
Two career U.S. officials, currently serving in the government, also said they were unsure whether they would continue in their positions, which are slated to last into the next administration.
On Monday morning, a group of officials working on a range of national security issues including the resettlement of refugees and methods for countering terrorists' violent rhetoric met to discuss their progress. But it wasn't at all clear whether a President Trump would even continue those initiatives, one participant said. Trump has promised to ban Muslims from certain countries from entering the United States and has claimed he knows better how to combat terrorists than military generals and intelligence officials.
But before he can take the axe to Obama-era programs, Trump has to staff up his own administration. It won't be easy.
It was clear the Trump team would have trouble staffing their national security bench nine months ago, when more than 100 Republican national security leaders signed an open letter vowing not to support him as the GOP nominee and "working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office."
"Everybody who has signed a never-Trump letter or indicated an anti-Trump attitude is not going to get a job. And that's most of the Republican foreign policy, national security, intelligence, homeland security, and Department of Justice experience," Paul Rosenzweig, who held a senior position at the Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration, told The Daily Beast. (Bush told reporters on Tuesday that neither he nor his wife, Laura, cast a vote for president.)