President Biden is rapidly re-making the executive branch of the federal government, sweeping away holdovers from the Trump administration and replacing them with hundreds of members of his own team, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
“If there has been a single defining feature of the first week of the Biden administration, it has been the blistering pace at which the new president has put his mark on what President Donald J. Trump dismissed as the hostile ‘Deep State’ and tried so hard to dismantle,” the Times says.
There is already a Biden team at work in every federal department, “including those like the hollowed-out Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which was run for the past four years by a disengaged secretary, Ben Carson, and a group of ideologically oriented appointees,” the Times says.
This is a reflection of the months of preparation Biden and his transition team put in before Inauguration Day.
“Mr. Biden had named nearly all of his cabinet secretaries and their immediate deputies before he took office last Wednesday, most of them familiar faces from the Obama administration,” the Times says. “But the president’s real grasp on the levers of power has come several layers down.”
The National Security Council (NSC) is a prime example.
The agency, central to U.S. foreign policy, already has Biden staff members in place for jobs that sometimes take months to fill, the Times says. That includes “a full homeland security staff and a new, expanded White House operation to oversee cyberoffense and defense.”
At the State Department — “the core of the Deep State in the view of Mr. Trump’s allies,” as the Times describes it — there haven’t been as many new appointments because professional Foreign Service officers and career officials were there to take over; they are now led by newly confirmed Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“In making appointments as a new president, Biden has a much tougher job than Trump,” Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, told the Times. “It’s harder to rebuild a government than it is to ransack, demoralize and hollow a government out.”
Climate change and the environment were among the very first issues Biden addressed — and after Trump’s destructive four years, that’s a breath of fresh air for environmentalists.
“It was clear that we were coming off of the most anti-environmental, anti-climate action administration we’ve ever had,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld of the League of Conservation Voters. “The need to act immediately was going to be so vitally important. There was a very intentional, very thoughtful, ambitious effort to get highly skilled experts in place right away.”
