Trump's people problem goes far beyond RFK Jr.

The president-elect has 4,000 jobs to fill, and the early appointees are all over the map

In the summer of 1980, Ronald Reagan campaign coordinator Lee Atwater turned to an aide who was in his mid-20s.

“Can you find 900 people for us in the next 40 days?” Atwater asked. “I sure can,” said Scot Faulkner, recalling, decades later, his “youthful certainty” that he could staff the general election campaign against President Jimmy Carter.

“On August 1, 1980, I became the youngest director of personnel for a presidential campaign in the twentieth century.”

Faulkner grew up in New Hampshire, where his mother was a devoted Republican and the family displayed Barry Goldwater campaign yard signs and “Nixon-Lodge” buttons. In eighth grade, Faulkner began to read William F. Buckley and Ayn Rand, as he recalled in his book Naked Emperors: The Failure of the Republican Revolution.

With the 900 people soon hired for the campaign and tracking polls showing that Reagan was going to beat Carter, Faulkner’s job soon turned to finding people for the new president’s administration. “In December, we were awash with 90,000 résumés,” he wrote in “Naked Emperors.”

“There was a threat that many conservatives could be edged out by more mainstream Republicans for key administration jobs," he observed.

Faulkner and other conservative activists met in an office above Washington’s Hawk ‘n’ Dove pub. “We discussed how to build an ‘affirmative action’ program for conservatives to obtain key positions around Reagan and within the agencies. ‘It’s like we are already fighting behind enemy lines,’ said an exasperated Jeff Hollingsworth. ‘It is the Inchon landing all over again,’ I mused, thinking of General Douglas MacArthur’s famous invasion behind enemy lines during the Korean War. The name stuck. ‘Inchon,’ the ultimate underground personnel network, had begun."

The Republican aides subscribed to the view that “people equals policy” — the only way to get the desired outcomes is to staff the government with the right people.

As the shape of the second Trump administration emerges bit by bit in social media posts from Mar-a-Lago, the question of which people and which policy agenda will prevail is uppermost.

Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Marco Rubio and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are all over the map, the farthest possible thing from a disciplined cadre of leaders seeking to achieve a shared policy objective. But they are only a tiny proportion of the eventual Trump governing coalition.

Presidents get to name at least 4,000 officials, and President-elect Donald Trump’s team is expected to renew his push to get 50,000 civil service jobs converted into political appointments, which would give him unprecedented control over government.

President Ronald Reagan with campaign operative Lee Atwater in 1983. (Reagan White House photo)

If there is ever a “people equals policy” moment, this would be it. But what is the policy?

RFK Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is just one example of the policy incoherence Trump seems to be creating.

During his since-abandoned independent campaign for president, Kennedy “found support from people across the political spectrum who shared his suspicion of the pharmaceutical and food industries and applauded his emphasis on nutrition and removing additives from foods,” the New York Times reported.

“But Mr. Kennedy has spread false information about vaccines, including that they cause autism — a theory that has long been debunked…”

“He has embraced raw milk, despite the Food and Drug Administration’s warning that drinking it is risky, particularly amid a bird flu epidemic among dairy cows. And he has promoted hydroxychloroquine, a drug whose emergency authorization as a Covid-19 treatment was revoked by the Food and Drug Administration after a study of 821 people found it lacked effectiveness.”

Kennedy joined the president-elect, his son Don Jr., Elon Musk and Speaker Mike Johnson to pose with McDonald’s products on board Trump’s private plane. Don Jr. posted the photo with the line, “Make America Healthy Again starts TOMORROW.” 

It was intended to draw laughs, but may have other consequences. “Leaders need to lead by example if they are truly going to commit to what they say — in RFK Jr’s case, eating healthy to tackle chronic disease,” said Eduardo J. Gómez, Director of the Institute of Health Policy and Politics at Lehigh University’s College of Health.

We got a glimpse of RFK’s true feelings on a podcast last week: “Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto [Trump Force One] is, like, just poison,” he said.

“You have a choice between — you don’t have the choice, you’re either given KFC or Big Macs. That’s when you’re lucky, and then the rest of the stuff I consider kind of inedible.”

Third wave

Trump’s new administration represents the third wave in the past 50 years of Republican leaders claiming they can radically cut the size of government.

The first was the “Reagan revolution,” which proved more successful at restraining government revenue through its 1986 tax cut than at reducing government spending. In 2023 dollars, adjusted to account for inflation, the federal government spent $2.33 trillion in 1981, Reagan’s first year in office, according to USAFacts.Org. By the time he left office in 1989, spending had risen to $2.83 trillion, a 21% increase.

"The forces of change are always racing the clock,” Faulkner wrote. “The idealism of opposition and the exhilaration of initial victory give way to the petty issues and jealousies of governance. A person changes from wanting change, to just holding on to what he or she has. Power for a purpose becomes power for its own sake.”

Power for a purpose becomes power for its own sake. — Scot Faulkner

Air cover

According to Faulkner, officials pushing for spending cuts need “air cover” from the president. In his account, Reagan provided that shield for reform of the General Services Administration under the leadership of Gerald Carmen.

But, Faulkner recalled, “the opposite scenario occurred at the Department of Education, where 75 highly capable and motivated conservatives sallied forth to dismantle federal education programs, only to have the White House back away from legislation to abolish the department. The result allowed Terrell Bell, the then secretary and committed defender of the Department of Education, to purge the department of all these conservative appointees during a yearlong internal siege."

Trump has called for sweeping educational policy changes, including closing the Education Department.

1994

Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 midterms. Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” promised “the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the people’s money.”

But it was ultimately only through compromise with the Democrats that limits on government spending were realized. President Bill Clinton and Congress were able to achieve a budget surplus from 1998 through 2001 by raising taxes, cutting defense spending and reaping the rewards of a fast-growing economy.  

Faulkner was unhappy with the final outcome, seeing Republicans retreating from their oft-proclaimed goal of “draining the swamp” of corruption and inefficiency in Washington. "The Republican Revolution of 1994 came very close to permanently defeating the ‘Swamp.’ Ultimately, the ‘Swamp’ won."

Surplus vanishes

The federal budget surplus vanished with the new millennium, thanks to tax cuts championed by President George W. Bush, an economic downturn and increases in spending.  

“President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ,” wrote Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center.

“In his last term in office, President Bush increased discretionary outlays by an estimated 48.6 percent.”

“During his eight years in office, President Bush spent almost twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton.  Adjusted for inflation, in eight years, President Clinton increased the federal budget by 12.5 percent. In eight years, President Bush increased it by a whopping 53 percent.” 

His successor, Barack Obama, slowed the rise in government spending, according to the USA Facts inflation-adjusted chart and narrowed the budget deficit after the US recovered from the 2008 fiscal crisis. But in Trump’s first administration, spending moved higher and revenues flatflined when tax cuts were passed in 2017. Government spending and the deficit soared further when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Musk’s mission

Elon Musk in 2022. (Photo by Trevor Cokley)

In the second Trump administration, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are heading up an outside effort, sanctioned by the president-elect, to radically cut the federal government.

It’s perhaps modeled on the radical staff cuts Musk imposed after he carried a porcelain sink into the Twitter headquarters to signal a new regime under his ownership. He has talked of cutting $2 trillion from the federal budget, a scale of reductions that experts say is inconceivable.

Musk will succeed “only if he moves boldly and learns from the past,” Faulkner wrote on Nov. 4 for Newsmax.

Whatever Musk proposes, how serious is Trump about the goal of shrinking the federal government? It’s been a talking point for Republicans for generations, but the only meaningful progress in limiting spending came during the administrations of two Democrats, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

In June of 1982, Reagan appointed a commission of more than 150 business leaders, headed by J. Peter Grace, to “eliminate waste and inefficiency in the federal government.”

As Faulkner noted, the Grace Commission’s “2,478 recommendations outlined $424 billion ($1,243 billion in 2024 value) to be saved in three years.”

“Congress ignored them all.”