Secretary of Defense James Mattis is naming key Obama allies to important defense positions in the Trump administration, and it’s infuriating congressional Republicans.
“He certainly has got a tough job, but it sometimes feels like he forgets that we won the election,” an aide to a GOP senator sitting on the Senate Committee on Armed Services told Politico.
“We’ve waited eight years for this, to be able to fill these posts with Republicans,” a top GOP Hill staffer said. “We know Trump isn’t part of the establishment and that it’s going to be a bit different, but it should go without saying that a Republican administration is expected to staff federal agencies with Republicans.”
Mattis has so far attempted to smuggle various progressives into the administration, whom he worked with in the past. He initially wanted Michele Flournoy as his deputy, a spot now-temporarily filled by Obama administration holdover Robert Work. Flournoy was deemed Hillary Clinton’s likely defense secretary and also served as the undersecretary of defense for policy during the Obama administration.
Mattis has also pushed the White House to nominate Rudy DeLeon, who served during the Clinton administration, to the position of undersecretary for personnel and readiness.
Meanwhile, Mattis has skipped over Republicans like former GOP Rep. Randy Forbes for secretary of the Navy.
Most recently, Mattis lost a battle with the House over trying to place Anne Patterson in the position of undersecretary for policy, mostly due to serious opposition from GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton. The two senators objected to Patterson, who served as the ambassador to Egypt during the Obama administration, because she was far too willing to back the administration’s line and engage with the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated government of then-Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. She even met with high-level Muslim Brotherhood officials. The Egyptian military overthrew Morsi in 2013.
Part of the problem the Trump administration is facing is that large swathes of the GOP national security community vocally opposed him during the presidential election, even going so far as to declare him unfit to serve in the White House.
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