With yet another totally unprepared, unvetted, ill-equipped Trump nominee on the stage, a new and exhaustive report from The Washington Post provides a timely look at how this administration's appointments are made. Sometimes, as with the case of presidential doctor Ronny Jackson to head up the VA, it's by the seat of Trump's pants. But when the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) is involved, the whole thing doesn't look much better. It turns out that's because the place is kind of a understaffed cesspool, with a frat house atmosphere and built mostly upon nepotism.
[T]wo office leaders have spotty records themselves: a college dropout with arrests for drunken driving and bad checks and a lance corporal in the Marine Corps reserves with arrests for assault, disorderly conduct, fleeing an officer and underage drinking. […]
Under President Trump, the office was launched with far fewer people than in prior administrations. It has served as a refuge for young campaign workers, a stopover for senior officials on their way to other posts and a source of jobs for friends and family, a Washington Post investigation found. One senior staffer has had four relatives receive appointments through the office.
PPO leaders hosted happy hours last year in their offices that included beer, wine and snacks for dozens of PPO employees and White House liaisons who work in federal agencies, White House officials confirmed. In January, they played a drinking game in the office called "Icing" to celebrate the deputy director's 30th birthday. Icing involves hiding a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, a flavored malt liquor, and demanding that the person who discovers it, in this case the deputy director, guzzle it.
The White House confirmed that PPO officials played the Icing game but said it and the happy hours are not unique to the PPO and are a way to network and let off steam.
The Post reports that the offices for the PPO are a "social hub" where "young staffers from throughout the administration stopped by to hang out on couches and smoke electronic cigarettes, known as vaping."
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The college dropout with drunk driving and check kiting arrests is Caroline Wiles, the 30-year old daughter of Susan Wiles, "a prominent lobbyist and political operative in Florida." She may or may not be one of the six White House staffers who have been dismissed because they couldn't clear their FBI background checks, but the White House wouldn't confirm that.
The other leader mentioned, the lance corporal, is Max Miller, 29. He was brought into the Trump campaign by his cousin Eli Miller, "then a senior finance official in the campaign and now chief of staff at the Treasury Department." A highlight among his multiple offenses, is from 2007, when we was "charged with assault, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after punching another male in the back of the head and running away from police, police records show." Two years later is another charge for underaged drinking, and then the next year a disorderly conduct charge for a brawl in which he was involved.
They do have an experienced colleague working with them, 75-year-old special assistant to the president Katja Bullock, who worked in the office during the Reagan administration and for both Bushes. She's the one who has four relatives newly tapped for political appointments in federal agencies—her son and daughter-in-law, and their two sons.
The entire story is very much worth the read, including the quote from Chris Christie, who was originally tapped as the head of the transition but quickly lost the job. He had actually put together a team of "more than 100 researchers and lawyers, who generated names of candidates for critical posts for a potential administration." That—"at least 100 candidates proposed for top jobs and 200 other prospective appointees"—went out the door with him. "The idea that you can take six months of work . . . and throw all that out, turned out to be a big mistake," said Christie, after the fact. Yeah. That.