Courtesy of Bastrop Advertiser
Dec. 2, 2020
By Bill McCann
Forty years ago an engineer friend convinced me to accept a job at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency where he worked. I had been producing an energy trade publication in Washington, D.C. when I jumped back into the federal employment pool. My new job was to take results of EPA’s technical research into water, wastewater, energy and other areas and turn it into readable, useful information to help communities and businesses make their operations cleaner, cheaper and more efficient. He said it would be fun. He was wrong.
Soon after I started, newly elected President Ronald Reagan appointed an attorney, Anne Gorsuch, as EPA administrator. She cut the budget, eased regulations on polluters, hired people who had worked for industries they would be regulating, and sidetracked most communications with the public, including my work. Many experienced professionals left or began looking for jobs. My friend apologized to me, saying: “I’m sorry. The grownups are leaving the building.”
I subsequently found a reporting job at the Austin American-Statesman and fled Washington. Gorsuch sliced and diced the EPA for almost two years, battling employees, environmentalists, congressional committees, and contempt charges against her by Congress for refusing to provide documents. Reagan finally ousted her and got the EPA’s first administrator William Ruckelshaus to return and restore morale and credibility. Shortly thereafter, I got a note in the mail saying, “The grownups are back in charge!”
I thought about my friend’s note last week when President-elect Joe Biden announced his initial picks for cabinet members and White House senior staff. They are a diverse group of experienced, competent professionals capable of steering the ship of state back to calmer waters after a four-year tsunami of incompetence, lies and corruption under President Donald Trump. None of those selected were Biden’s relatives. It looks like grownups will be in charge again.
Biden’s initial choices prompted an Associated Press story to declare: “Competence is making a comeback.” For instance, Janet Yellen, Biden’s choice for treasury secretary, is a respected economist who was formerly chair of the Federal Reserve and formerly chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. His choice for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is an experienced diplomat and foreign policy expert. He is a former deputy secretary of state and former deputy national security adviser.
Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, former NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, told the Associated Press that Biden’s initial hires “tend to be calm and centered and they won’t fight over the ball.” He added: “It’s a completely different approach than what we saw with the Trump team and I hesitate to call it a team because they didn’t work all that well together.” That’s an understatement.
Remember former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who was appointed by Trump as energy secretary, a department that Perry initially wanted to abolish, except he couldn’t remember its name? Or Betsy DeVos, an opponent of public education who knew little about education policy when she was appointed education secretary. Or the recently pardoned Michael Flynn who lasted only 24 days as Trump’s national security adviser. Or Rex Tillerson, the oil executive who Trump appointed as secretary of state reportedly because he looked like a secretary of state. Tillerson had no foreign policy experience, but he did get a friendship medal from Trump’s pal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The list of Trump’s appointee failures goes on and on.
If our democracy prevails, Trump and his dingbats of dysfunction and demagoguery soon will be gone. My advice to Biden: Continue to make sound selections for practical, professional reasons, not political ones. And when you get to the White House, remember to check for booby traps – and count the silver.
