Recruiting Lawmakers for the Cabinet

  Philip Wallach and Jaehun Lee at AEI:

When he was first elected president in November 2016, Donald Trump chose a diverse array of businessmen, generals, and Republican stalwarts to fill his cabinet. With a few of his picks, including Mick Mulvaney as director of the Office of Management and Budget and Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Trump also built bridges to congressional Republicans—a shrewd move for a political outsider.

But now that he has been reelected in 2024, Trump’s picks for his second term cabinet have drawn even more heavily from veterans of Congress. Indeed, by our calculations, Trump 47 is leaning harder on Capitol Hill than any other post-WWII administration.

The headline figure (38 percent, or eight out of 21 cabinet-level picks) excludes five other former members Trump has tapped for important administration jobs, especially in the intelligence world. (The note below describes our full calculations.)

What has motivated Trump—who is hardly a deep admirer of America’s legislature?

Perhaps Trump wants to enlist legislators for their ability to navigate the complexities of the legislative process. A few picks plausibly fit this model, including Senator Marco Rubio, Rep. Elise Stefanik (the current number four in House Republican leadership), and former Rep. Doug Collins. In this way of thinking, presidents (like Trump) without their own record of legislative service will rely more heavily on former members, which the historical record supports.

Most of Trump’s choices point in another direction, though. Far from being known as effective legislative operators, several of his nominees were known as fiery critics of their colleagues. Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard stand out as having more enemies than friends in Congress.

These nominees better fit a different model for understanding nominees with congressional background: coalition maintenance. From this point of view, fitting into the party in a particular way matters as much as long legislative experience, and indeed Trump’s picks are below the average number of years of service.

POTUS and SECDEF

 Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin failed to inform the president or the press about his recent hospitalization. Politico:

To break down this particular element of an ever-expanding story, West Wing Playbook called LEON PANETTA, who served both as White House chief of staff under BILL CLINTON and secretary of defense under BARACK OBAMA. This conversation has been edited for length.

What’s gone through your mind has you’ve followed this story?

He’s accepted responsibility and said he’s going to do a better job. Look, I’ve been in and out of Washington for over 50 years. There’s a lesson that is always very hard to learn in Washington, which is that you’re always better off telling the truth. And if you in any way try to avoid it, the truth is eventually going to come out. And you’ll pay a price.

How did this communication work for you when you were in these roles?

When I was chief of staff, it was the case that people in the Cabinet called me and gave me a heads up if they were either going to be gone, leave town for a while or be hospitalized. We had a policy that that should be the case.

And when I was in the Obama administration, I would stay in pretty regular touch with Rahm Emmanuel, who was chief of staff, both with regards to where I was going, but also the operations I was involved with.

So there wasn’t a handbook on your first day laying out those expectations on the delegation of power and communication? It’s more of an understanding?

There’s been a gradual deterioration here with regards to the role of the Cabinet. Because so much authority is centralized in the White House these days, the Cabinet really only comes together usually for a press briefing by the president.

Normally, what should be the case is there’s a secretary to the Cabinet, and there should be regular meetings with the Cabinet to not only inform them about issues going on but also to stay in touch with them, so that they feel like they’re part of the team. As that relationship generally has been strained in the last number of years, I think everybody kind of operates on their own. You saw a little bit of that happen here.

Cabinet Communicators!

Kevin Bogardus at E&E News:

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last year praised President Trump's decision to pull the United States from the Paris climate accord.

Her staff later told her what she had said about it.

DeVos' chief of staff approved the secretary's two-sentence statement on Trump's exit from the climate change agreement, with her espousing the president's rollback of "overreaching regulatory actions" and keeping his promise "to put America and American workers first." Aides later worked to bring it to DeVos' attention, according to emails obtained by E&E News under the Freedom of Information Act.

The emails offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the White House ordered agency leaders to publicly praise Trump's announcement on Paris, which was a year ago today. Cabinet secretaries and their communications shops jumped into action, with messages ranging from DeVos' vague praise of putting "America first" to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross decrying the "economic carnage" of the climate treaty.
...

DeVos was one of several Trump Cabinet officials to issue statements on the president's Paris decision. At least nine officials, including many not heavily involved in the move to withdraw from the agreement, released statements that day (Greenwire, June 2).

The public relations push came after a request from the White House, according to other records obtained by E&E News under FOIA.

"Cabinet Communicators!" Kaelan Dorr, then an aide in the White House press office, said in an email a little over two hours before Trump announced his decision.

"Please join our surrogate briefing call at the below number at 1:30pm. We need all Cabinet agencies to prep statements of support for the decision being announced at 3:00pm in the Rose Garden," he said, asking those statements be sent to him and other White House press aides for approval within 30 minutes of the call's conclusion.

"No exceptions," Dorr said, adding that talking points would also be distributed after the call.

Presidents and Attorneys General

From the Comey memos:

At about this point, he asked me to compare AG Holder and AG Lynch. I said I thought AG Holder was smarter and more sophisticated and smoother than AG Lynch, who I added is a good person. He said Holder and President Obama were quite close. I replied that they were and it illustrated, in my view, a mistake Presidents make over and over again: Because they reason for a President come from Justice, they try to bring Justice close, which paradoxically makes things worse because an independent DOJ and FBI are better for a president and the country. I listed off John Mitchell, Ed Meese, and Al Gonzales as examples of this mistake, and he added Bobby Kennedy.

Secretary of State

At Foreign Policy, Robert Jervis writes:

The secretary of state draws his or her power less from the U.S. Constitution or the laws than from five sources: backing from the president, advice and support from his or her department’s career officials, admiration from and alliances with other leaders in the government, praise from the press and public, and positive evaluations of his or her competence and power by foreign diplomats. These individuals and groups do not act independently but rather depend on each other and interact to build up or tear down the secretary’s power. Perceptions and reality blend as to be seen as powerful or weak, and that can readily become self-fulfilling in the Washington echo chamber.

..
These sources of power are not independent of each other. The more the secretary is seen as enjoying the president’s confidence, the more he or she gains respect from others in the cabinet and professional diplomats, both American and foreign. Conversely, the president is less likely to keep his or her secretary close if the latter is viewed as weak or ineffective by other audiences. The role of the press is important here less as a describer of the scene than as a means of keeping all the other players informed and rendering independent judgments of its own. Washington is a small community, and reputations develop quickly and matter a great deal.

With these weaknesses reinforcing each other, Tillerson is on a downward spiral. Reversing it will require open support from the president, most obviously by his scrapping the diplomatic and foreign aid budget cuts, ratifying Tillerson’s choice of top subordinates, including him in high-profile meetings, and endorsing some of his policies, such as not withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate change agreement. In parallel, Tillerson needs to assert the role of the State Department in issues of trade and migration that are central to Trump’s concerns. Meeting with the press and displaying command of the issues would also be important steps.

Without measures like these, Tillerson and his department are likely to recede even further into the background. This would not be unprecedented: William Rogers played only a small role in Richard Nixon’s foreign policy. But since Trump is not Nixon, and McMaster is not likely to become Henry Kissinger, under the current administration the result would likely be the diminution not only of the secretary of state but of diplomacy as well.

Filling the Swamp

Pro Publica reports:

A Trump campaign aide who argues that Democrats committed “ethnic cleansing” in a plot to “liquidate” the white working class. A former reality show contestant whose study of societal collapse inspired him to invent a bow-and-arrow-cum-survivalist multi-tool. A pair of healthcare industry lobbyists. A lobbyist for defense contractors. An “evangelist” and lobbyist for Palantir, the Silicon Valley company with close ties to intelligence agencies. And a New Hampshire Trump supporter who has only recently graduated from high school.

These are some of the people the Trump administration has hired for positions across the federal government, according to documents received by ProPublica through public-records requests.

While President Trump has not moved to fill many jobs that require Senate confirmation, he has quietly installed hundreds of officials to serve as his eyes and ears at every major federal agency, from the Pentagon to the Department of Interior.

Unlike appointees exposed to the scrutiny of the Senate, members of these so-called “beachhead teams” have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities.

While some names have previously dribbled out in the press, we are publishing a list of more than 400 hires, providing the most complete accounting so far of who Trump has brought into the federal government.

The White House said in January that around 520 staffers were being hired for the beachhead teams.

The list we obtained includes obscure campaign staffers, contributors to Breitbart and others who have embraced conspiracy theories, as well as dozens of Washington insiders who could be reasonably characterized as part of the “swamp” Trump pledged to drain.

The list is striking for how many former lobbyists it contains: We found at least 36, spanning industries from health insurance and pharmaceuticals to construction, energy and finance. Many of them lobbied in the same areas that are regulated by the agencies they have now joined.

Here Are More Than 400 Officials Trump Has Quietly Deployed Across the Government

Rejection Season

The Senate lists rejected and withdrawn Cabinet nominations.  At the bottom of this page are the seven that have failed during the past 30 years, and I add the reasons for the failure.  All involved questions of about ethics or personal misconduct.  (Kerik later went to prison on other charges.)

The list shows that the last four presidents -- George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all lost a nominee in their first couple of months in office.

It seems very likely that Labor nominee Andrew Pudzer will be the latest entry.

Manu Raju reports at CNN:

Top Senate Republicans have urged the White House to withdraw the Andrew Puzder nomination for labor secretary, a senior GOP source said, adding there are four firm Republican no votes and possibly up to 12.

Puzder needs at least 50 votes to pass with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Mike Pence, and Republicans only hold control of 52 seats.

Puzder, the CEO of the company that owns the Hardee's and Carl's Jr. fast food chains, has faced fierce opposition mostly from Democrats in part related to his position on labor issues as well as the fact that he employed an undocumented housekeeper.

=========================================================
Name: John G. Tower
Nominated by: George Bush
Nomination Position: Defense
Date Nominated: January 20, 1989
Date Rejected: March 9, 1989 Vote: 47-53

Reasons: drinking, conduct toward women, financial conflicts 

Name: Zoe E. Baird
Nominated by: William J. Clinton
Nomination Position: Attorney General
Date Nominated: January 21, 1993
Date Withdrawn: January 26, 1993
Reason:  Undocumented household employee
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Anthony Lake
Nominated by: William J. Clinton
Nomination Position: Director, CIA
Date Nominated: January 9, 1997
Date Withdrawn: April 18, 1997
Reasons: policy disputes, financial issues
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Hershel W. Gober
Nominated by: William J. Clinton
Nomination Position: Veterans Affairs
Date Nominated: July 31, 1997
Date Withdrawn: October 27, 1997
Reason: sexual misconduct allegations
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Linda Chavez
Nominated by: George W. Bush
Nomination Position: Labor
Date Nominated: January 3, 2001
Date Withdrawn: January 9, 2001
Reason: undocumented household employee
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Bernard Kerik
Nominated by: George W. Bush
Nomination Position: Homeland Security
Date Nominated: December 2, 2004
Date Withdrawn: December 10, 2004
Reason:  undocumented household employee
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Tom Daschle
Nominated by: Barack Obama
Nomination Position: Secretary of Health & Human Services
Date Nominated: December 11, 2008
Date Withdrawn: February 9, 2009
Reason: tax issues

Carson and Unsuccessful Cabinet Nominations

The Senate lists rejected and withdrawn Cabinet nominations.  At the bottom of this page are the seven that have failed during the past 30 years, and I add the reasons for the failure.  All involved questions of about ethics or personal misconduct.  (Kerik later went to prison on other charges.)

In this light, the greatest danger to Ben Carson's nomination as HUD secretary is not his total lack of experience, but his dubious friendships and business connections.

In January 2015, National Review's Jim Geraghty raised questions about his ties to Mannaatech,a nutritional supplement company.

In November 2015, Michael Biesecker and Eileen Sullivan reported at AP:

Ben Carson has called for harsh criminal penalties for health care fraud, but the Republican presidential candidate and his wife also have kept millions invested with a close friend who admitted defrauding insurance companies, according to an Associated Press review.

Pittsburgh dentist Alfonso A. Costa pleaded guilty to a felony count of health care fraud after an FBI probe into his oral surgery practice found he had charged for procedures he never performed, according to court records.

Though the crime carries a potential sentence of up to 10 years in federal prison, Costa was sentenced to house arrest and probation after Carson helped petition a federal judge on behalf of the man he described as "one my closest, if not my very closest friend."

In February of this year, David A. Graham reported at The Atlantic:

For months, reporters and political operatives (including me) have been pointing out that Ben Carson’s campaign bears many of the hallmarks of a political scam operation. Now Carson seems to agree. On CNN on Tuesday, Carson discussed his year-end staff shake-up:

“We had people who didn't really seem to understand finances," a laughing Carson told CNN's Poppy Harlow on "CNN Newsroom," adding, "or maybe they did—maybe they were doing it on purpose."

It’s a remarkable statement—especially because he’s so blithe about it.

Carson has taken in incredible amounts of money during the race. His campaign has raised more than any other Republican presidential rival, though they’ve raised more when super PACs are included. But he’s also spent more than any of them, so that despite his prolific fundraising, he has barely $4 million in cash on hand.

=========================================================
Name: John G. Tower
Nominated by: George Bush
Nomination Position: Defense
Date Nominated: January 20, 1989
Date Rejected: March 9, 1989 Vote: 47-53

Reasons: drinking, conduct toward women, financial conflicts 

Name: Zoe E. Baird
Nominated by: William J. Clinton
Nomination Position: Attorney General
Date Nominated: January 21, 1993
Date Withdrawn: January 26, 1993
Reason:  Undocumented household employee
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Anthony Lake
Nominated by: William J. Clinton
Nomination Position: Director, CIA
Date Nominated: January 9, 1997
Date Withdrawn: April 18, 1997
Reasons: policy disputes, financial issues
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Hershel W. Gober
Nominated by: William J. Clinton
Nomination Position: Veterans Affairs
Date Nominated: July 31, 1997
Date Withdrawn: October 27, 1997
Reason: sexual misconduct allegations
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Linda Chavez
Nominated by: George W. Bush
Nomination Position: Labor
Date Nominated: January 3, 2001
Date Withdrawn: January 9, 2001
Reason: undocumented household employee
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Bernard Kerik
Nominated by: George W. Bush
Nomination Position: Homeland Security
Date Nominated: December 2, 2004
Date Withdrawn: December 10, 2004
Reason:  undocumented household employee
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Tom Daschle
Nominated by: Barack Obama
Nomination Position: Secretary of Health & Human Services
Date Nominated: December 11, 2008
Date Withdrawn: February 9, 2009
Reason: tax issues

Cabinet Appointments

Why don't presidential candidates name their future cabinet appointees in advance?  Title 18, Part I, Chapter 29, Section 599 of the U.S. Code says:

Whoever, being a candidate, directly or indirectly promises or pledges the appointment, or the use of his influence or support for the appointment of any person to any public or private position or employment, for the purpose of procuring support in his candidacy shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if the violation was willful, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

The law is not entirely clear, however.  Five years ago, Rick Hasen wrote:

Political Wire flags the issue. The federal statute bars making such promises “for the purpose of procuring support in his candidacy.” I read this as requiring proof Gingrich said he would appoint Bolton for the purpose of getting Bolton’s support. More likely, Gingrich made the promise to gain support from voters. I recall a similar issue around alleged promises of employment in the Obama administration to Joe Sestak to get him to drop out of the race against Arlen Specter. After nosing around, I found virtually no prosecutions or caselaw developing such rules.

Deliberation in the Cabinet

In his memoir, Seeking Bipartisanship, former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood writes of the absence of deliberation in the Obama cabinet:

During my time in the Obama administration, I never attended a Cabinet meeting during which a meaningful decision was reached about important issues. It was all for show. As far as I could tell, our discussions changed not a single mind on policy questions or administration strategy. The meetings simply allowed the president to announce that he had consulted his Cabinet about decisions he and his advisers had already made.

The Educated Elite

At The Washington Post, Patrick J. Egan notes the elite educational background of Obama appointees:



At The New Republic, Dahlia Lithwick writes of the Supreme Court:

But while we have gained diversity of background, we haven’t gained diversity of experience. A study released in February revealed that 71 percent of Obama’s nominees had practiced primarily for corporate or business clients. The Supreme Court is even more homogeneous, because the modern confirmation gauntlet only lets one kind of person through. Post-Robert Bork, a nominee must not have too obvious an ideological agenda, as some judges and almost all elected officials do. Post-Harriet Miers, a prospective justice must possess not just a stellar résumé but also a track record of judicial rulings and legal writings from which future decisions can be confidently deduced.

The result has been what Professor Akhil Reed Amar of Yale Law School calls the “Judicialization of the Judiciary,” a selection process that discourages political or advocacy experience and reduces the path to the Supreme Court to a funnel: elite schools beget elite judicial clerkships beget elite federal judgeships. Rinse, repeat. All nine sitting justices attended either Yale or Harvard law schools. (Ginsburg started her studies in Cambridge but graduated from Columbia.) Eight once sat on a federal appellate court; five have done stints as full-time law school professors. There is not a single justice “from the heartland,” as Clarence Thomas has complained. There are no war veterans (like John Paul Stevens), former Cabinet officials (like Robert Jackson), or capital defense attorneys. The Supreme Court that decided Brownv. Board of Education had five members who had served in elected office. The Roberts Court has none. What we have instead are nine perfect judicial thoroughbreds who have spent their entire adulthoods on the same lofty, narrow trajectory.

Presidential Decision-Making

At PowerLine, Steve Hayward writes that President Reagan actively encouraged disagreement among aides and officials as a way of fostering deliberation.

In a 1983 interview with USA Today Reagan dilated the point:

“I understand that in the past, Cabinets, for example—each person had his own turf and no one else in the Cabinet would talk about a decision affecting the turf of that one Cabinet member. I don’t do business that way. Ours is more like a board of directors. I want all the input, because there are very few issues that don’t lap over into other areas. . . The only thing different from a board of directors is that I don’t take a vote. I know that I have to make the decision.”

Of course, our simpleminded media portrayed the divisions within the Reagan White House as merely representing a split between the “ideologues” and “pragmatists,” without ever stopping to ponder how this contradicted their other favorite dismissal of Reagan that he was chiefly a creature of his staff. (How could that be, if his staff was so bitterly divided?)

Which brings me to Ryan Lizza’s story two years ago in The New Yorker about Obama’s very hierarchical decision-making process. People have started saying the Obama has “checked out” of his own presidency. I’m not sure he ever really checked in to begin with. Looking back now at Lizza’s piece we could already see that Obama had become the president that Reagan’s critics wrongly said he was:

President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting. In the morning, each document is returned to his staff secretary. She dates and stamps it—“Back from the OVAL”—and often e-mails an index of the President’s handwritten notes to the relevant senior staff and their assistants. . .

If the document is a decision memo, its author usually includes options for Obama to check at the end. The formatting is simple, but the decisions are not. As Obama told the Times, early in his first term, Presidents are rarely called on to make the easy choices. “Somebody noted to me that by the time something reaches my desk, that means it’s really hard,” he said. “Because if it were easy, somebody else would have made the decision and somebody else would have solved it.”

Cabinet Blues

At Politico, Glenn Thrush explains that a Cabinet post is not nearly as powerful as it sounds.

Sixteen years ago, president Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, Robert Reich, summed up the frustrations of adjusting to life in the Cabinet, where even a close personal relationship with the president, dating to their Oxford days, didn’t spare him from being bossed around by arrogant West Wing nobodies. “From the view of the White House staff, cabinet officials are provincial governors presiding over alien, primitive territories,” Reich wrote in a classic of the p---ed-off-secretary genre, Locked in the Cabinet. “Anything of any importance occurs in the national palace.”

Two presidents later, the Cabinet is a swarm of 23 people that includes 15 secretaries and eight other Cabinet-rank officers. And yet never has the job of Cabinet secretary seemed smaller. The staffers who rule Obama’s West Wing often treat his Cabinet as a nuisance: At the top of the pecking order are the celebrity power players, like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to be warily managed; at the bottom, what they see as a bunch of well-intentioned political naifs only a lip-slip away from derailing the president’s agenda. [Energy Secretary Stevn] Chu might have been the first Obama Cabinet secretary to earn the disdain of White House aides, but he was hardly the last.

“We are completely marginalized … until the s--- hits the fan,” says one former Cabinet deputy secretary, summing up the view of many officials I interviewed. “If your question is: Did the president rely a lot on his Cabinet as a group of advisers? No, he didn’t,” says former Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Little wonder, then, that Obama has called the group together only rarely, for what by most accounts are not much more than ritualistic team-building exercises: According to CBS News White House reporter Mark Knoller, the Cabinet met 19 times in Obama’s first term and four times in the first 10 months of his second term. That’s once every three months or so—about as long as you can drive around before you’re supposed to change your oil.

Hagel's Bad Day

The Constitution empowers the Senate to confirm the president's nominees for Cabinet posts and other high office.  In all of US history, it has rejected just nine Cabinet nominees.  A dozen other nominees either withdrew or failed to get a floor vote.  Nevertheless, confirmation hearings can be contentious: senators can use them to gain publicity, score political points, or send policy messages to the administration.  Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense, had a difficult time in his confirmation hearing yesterday. CNN reports:



Dana Bash also reports that John McCain (R-Arizona), who was very tough on Hagel, was once a close ally:




Lindsay Graham (R-SC), another senator who has been close to McCain, illustrates a point about political rhetoric:  when you make a categorical statement, you'd better be prepared for a particular kind of followup question:  "Name one."

A Deliberative Cabinet

Raymond Smith, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, writes in The New York Times about deliberation within the executive branch:

Over the past half-century, however, the expansion of the White House staff has centralized deliberation and decision making increasingly within the confines of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. This reliance on professional staffers, political advisers and media spinmeisters within a constrictive White House “security bubble” deprives presidents not only of the deep substantive policy expertise of top civil servants but also of the political judgment of cabinet members who are often successful politicians.

A strengthened cabinet could promote frank and creative deliberation, help coordinate policy across government and make sure all members are delivering the same political message. All of this could go far in staving off the inertia and drift so common in presidential second terms.

Smith's suggestions include the following:

Employ the cabinet as a deliberative body: Cabinet meetings have become little more than occasional photo ops. Under Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, cabinet meetings were held monthly; the Obama team has met less than one-third as often. By contrast, the British, German and many other parliamentary cabinets meet weekly to assure that the entire team shares a common and coordinated vision. More regular and meaningful cabinet meetings could strengthen links across departments and with the White House staff, bolstering cooperation and reducing overlap and miscommunication.

Jack Lew

Previous posts have discussed "revolving doors" linking government service both to the interest group community and the press. One example is White House chief of staff Jack Lew, the president's nominee for Treasury secretary.  Open Secrets reports:

Lew is known inside Washington circles first and foremost as a budget wonk and has recently gained a reputation as a shrewd negotiator in the White House. But he also has a revolving door past, a history that includes deep ties to the federal government and Wall Street, an industry he'll work closely with if he gets the job.

Lew has twice served as head of the Office of Management and Budget, most recently from 2010-2011, and had a leading role at the State Department in between. His first major D.C. posts, however, were on Capitol Hill. Lew worked for two lawmakers in the 1970s and '80s, including as a senior policy advisor for former Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill.

Lew's Wall Street history was comparatively brief but notable: He was a managing director of Citigroup Alternative Investments. Lew rode out the 2008 financial crisis from that perch. His sizable compensation package has left some, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), with questions about why Lew was paid so handsomely at a time of such industry upheaval.

Prior to his Wall Street years, Lew also practiced law as a partner at the firm Van Ness Feldman and Curtis, where he gained an intimate familiarity with energy-based issues -- as well as many prominent energy firms.

The Washington Post elaborates:

In early 2008, he became a top executive in the Citigroup unit that housed many of the bank’s riskiest operations, including its hedge funds and private equity investments. Massive losses in that unit helped drive Citigroup into the arms of the federal government, which bailed out the bank with $45 billion in taxpayer money that year.

The group had been under pressure to compete with similar units at other big Wall Street firms and, some analysts say, took on too many risks as it played catch-up.

“The mismanagement of risk was comprehensive at that organization,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Cabinet

Todd Purdum writes at Vanity Fair:

The days when presidential Cabinets contained the likes of Thomas Jefferson as secretary of state, or Alexander Hamilton as secretary of the Treasury, are long since gone (and those early Cabinets displayed a fractiousness that no modern president would be likely to tolerate), though Cabinet officers retain symbols of office—from flags to drivers to, in some cases, chefs—befitting grander figures. The lingering public image of Cabinet meetings as the scene of important action is largely a myth. “They are not meetings where policy is determined or decisions are made,” the late Nicholas Katzenbach, who served Lyndon Johnson as attorney general, recalled in his memoirs. Nevertheless, Katzenbach attended them faithfully, “not because they were particularly interesting or important, but simply because”—remembering L.B.J.’s awful relationship with the previous attorney general, Bobby Kennedy—“I did not want the president to feel I was not on his team.” Even as recently as the 1930s, Cabinet figures such as Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and Postmaster General James A. Farley were important advisers to Franklin D. Roosevelt (and, in the cases of Perkins and Ickes, priceless diarists and chroniclers) in areas beyond their lanes of departmental responsibility, just as Robert F. Kennedy was his brother’s all-purpose sounding board and McNamara provided J.F.K. with advice on business and economics well outside his purview at the Pentagon. “Cabinet posts are great posts,” says Dan Glickman, who was Bill Clinton’s agriculture secretary. “But you realize that the days of Harry Hopkins and others who were in the Cabinet and were key advisers to the president—that really isn’t true anymore.”

...
The sharp growth in the White House staff in the years since World War II has also meant that policy functions once reserved for Cabinet officers are now performed by top aides inside the White House itself. Obama meets regularly and privately with Tim Geithner and Hillary Clinton, but almost certainly sees his national-security adviser, Tom Donilon, and his economic adviser, Gene Sperling, even more often. The relentless media cycle now moves so swiftly that any president, even one less inclined toward centralized discipline than Obama, might naturally rely on the White House’s quick-on-the-draw internal-messaging machine instead of bucking things through the bureaucratic channels of the executive departments.