With President Trump’s announcement that he plans to nominate Kirstjen Nielsen as homeland security secretary, he still has one more Cabinet post to fill — health and human services secretary. A president having to find replacements for two Cabinet secretaries this early in an administration is unprecedented. But observers are more alarmed by the less visible vacancies at the sub-Cabinet level: hundreds of positions without a nominee, and a president who says he has no intention of filling many of the jobs.
“I’m generally not going to make a lot of the appointments that would normally be — because you don’t need them,” Trump said in an interview with Forbes Magazine last week. “I mean, you look at some of these agencies, how massive they are, and it’s totally unnecessary. They have hundreds of thousands of people.”
Asked about the president’s comment, press secretary Sarah Sanders said that some jobs are in the process of being filled, with candidates going through an intensive vetting process, but that “the president came to Washington to drain the swamp and get rid of a lot of duplication, make government more efficient. And so if we can have one person do a job instead of six, then we certainly want to do that.”
Read this story now for free
To continue reading, sign up for our newsletter and get unlimited access to WABE.org
You can select your preferences for news and local content. We will never share your email address. Learn how your newsletter sign-up will support WABE and Public Media
