During the 2016 presidential election, then-candidate Donald J. Trump pledged to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C. and clean out much of the bureaucratic mess that has poisoned this country.
Unfortunately, some of the members of the president’s cabinet have ties to the Washington swamp, and are trying to put individuals in power with deep connections to the bureaucracy, but the president is fighting back.
General Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis was confirmed by the Senate 98-1 to lead the Pentagon, and has broad support from America’s military, but that hasn’t stopped the president and his White House from interjecting when members of our military stray from the president’s pledge to “drain the swamp.”
General Mattis is looking to tap Anne Patterson as his Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Patterson is an Obama official who served as ambassador to Egypt from 2011-2013 and worked close with the country’s short-lived Islamic leader Mohamed Morsi and his government. Despite her lengthy resume, her ties to the Obama administration as well as other issues have raised some flags with President Trump and her potential hiring may come up short.
Latest in series of skirmishes over personnel: WH pushing back against Mattis pick for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Anne Patterson https://t.co/4CyTB9m8bB
— Eliana Johnson (@elianayjohnson) March 3, 2017
From Politico:
She came under fire for cultivating too close a relationship with the regime and for discouraging protests against it—and White House officials are voicing concerns about those decisions now.
The skirmish surrounding Patterson’s nomination is the latest in a series of personnel battles that have played out between Mattis and the White House, with each side rejecting the names offered up by the other while the Pentagon remains empty. The White House has yet to nominate a single undersecretary or deputy secretary to the Defense Department, while Work, Mattis’s deputy, is an Obama administration holdover who only agreed to stay on until the secretary taps a deputy of his own.
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“The biggest pushback [from the White House] is that she was ambassador to Egypt immediately before and after the Morsi presidency,” said a person familiar with the conversations. For Mattis’s part, he has “put her name forward and he doesn’t quite understand why people have an objection,” the person said.
While it is certainly understandable why General Mattis wants to hire individuals with whom he has a good working relationship, the Trump White House is right to be concerned over former Obama officials in places of high power.
These types of appointments represent the swamp that needs to be drained, and career government employees who for years have supported failed foreign policies should not be rewarded with promotions within our government.
Do you support the Trump White House’s decision to push back against the nomination of a career government employee who has deep ties to Barack Obama? Share your thoughts below!