White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Trump’s Washington: A Government of Strangers

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Prepare for a government of strangers: people we don’t know and haven’t met.

That government, those strangers, or mostly strangers, will shape the presidency of Donald Trump — not the slogans, not the declarations of intentions, not the hopes of those who threw in with Trump, but the merging of those interests represented by officeholders who aren’t well known in Washington or the nation.

In the short time between now and Jan. 20, the Trump transition team has to come up with some very key players, who eventually will have to be confirmed by the Senate — an easier prospect with a Republican-controlled Senate, but not a slam-dunk.

In relations with the world’s nations, some of whom Trump has vigorously unfriended during the campaign, these jobs will be of first importance, including secretary of state; secretary of defense; national security adviser; secretary of the treasury; and secretary of energy (often forgotten as a defense agency), who is the keeper of our nuclear arsenal.

Domestically, Trump needs to name quickly staff at the White House, especially the Office of Management and Budget, which, within short weeks of climbing aboard, must prepare a budget for him to send to Capitol Hill. That budget will be, in many ways, the first indication of how Trump plans to govern. Republican as much as Democrats will be leery of what it contains.

After those critical positions, there are an incredible 4,000 additional positions to filled, 100 of which require Senate confirmation.

The conservative think tanks in Washington stand ready to heed the call, and maybe to provoke it, if they have an in. The think tanks are sounding boards for political ideas, like what to do about health care, foreign policy and trade, but they also represent something of a government in exile.

When a party is defeated, the ranks of the think tanks sympathetic to that party swell. Expect to see the Brookings Institution, the Progressive Policy Institute, the Economic Policy Institute and the New America Foundation find places for those leaving the Obama Administration.

Likewise, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the newer Foreign Policy Initiative will be ready to disgorge their best to serve in government.

It is a changing of the guard that takes place with each election that results in a change of party.

After the think tanks, or maybe in lockstep, come the universities. Look for Obama refugees to show up at places like Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government: a kind of halfway house for politicos. MIT and Stanford expect to have their faculty raided for the top jobs in the department of defense, energy and homeland security. Whether Trump and his people will raid these larders of talent is unknown.

Normally, White House watchers have a trail of crumbs to follow. They can say so-and-so was at college with the president, that professor so-and-so helped him form a position on nuclear power, or some think-tanker may have had a role in the campaign.

The Trump the clues are meager. Only four names stand out: Steve Bannon of Breitbart News, his campaign’s chief executive, Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, his transition team head, and Sean Hannity of Fox News. Another clue: Many on the campaign staff once worked for Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.).

Journalists will be watching the Trump camp just as Kremlin watchers in the days of the Soviet Union watched for hints out of Moscow. How will Trump govern? Who will staff his administration?

While Trump and his administration get settled in, while they find out how enormously complicated and far-flung the responsibilities of the U.S. government are, the day to day running of the country will be with the disparaged civil service: the bureaucrats so despised by Trump the campaigner, now his vital aides in transition.

— For InsideSources

Photo credit: Alex Barth, “Washington Monument” Washington DC, 2009. Used under the Creative Commons Generic 2.0 license

OMB Faulted in Nuclear Abandonment

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If you are heading north on the Chesapeake Bay, just above where the Patuxent River enters it, and you will see the Cove Point liquefied natural gas terminal and gas processing plant.

Journey on, about three miles, and you will see a superbly landscaped industrial installation that, unlike the gas terminal, blends into the cliffs of Maryland. This is the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, which has been making electricity quietly, efficiently and abundantly since 1975.

By contrast, the Cove Point terminal and gas plant has been a symbol of the vagaries of the gas market. Much of the time it has stood idle, with fishermen maneuvering their boats among its piers.

The terminal and gas plant were built when the nation was gripped by the energy crises of the 1970s, the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian Revolution. In reality, it has been seldom used and has been in and out of operation.

Until a week ago the Calvert Cliffs 1 and 2 reactors on the site, 55 miles from Washington, were set to get a sibling. Calvert Cliffs 3, a joint venture between Baltimore-based Constellation Energy and Electricite de France (EDF), the mammoth French utility, was to join the two venerable reactors.

But now there will be no Calvert Cliffs 3, according to one of its promoters, Constellation Energy.

The project has been canceled–strangled in its crib, if you like, by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which insisted on a sky-high fee in return for federal guarantees of the private commercial loans the utilities needed to finance unit 3.

By effective axing a new reactor, OMB was acting against the Department of Energy, Congress, and possibly the wishes of President Obama.

The nuclear industry and Unistar, the Franco-American company created to build Calvert Cliffs 3, say the fee was wrongly calculated and that OMB is contradicting the intention of Congress and the expressed hopes of Obama.

Two other projects are also facing cancellation over the OMB calculation for its loan guarantees. The utilities say the terms dictated by OMB are onerous, just too expensive.

Yet the industry can find no appellate route to overcome OMB’s stubbornness. The result is that the much-anticipated “nuclear renaissance” is sliding back into the dark ages. Only the Atlanta-based Southern Company has come to terms with the government and secured the loan guarantees it sought to build Vogtle, a two-unit plant.

Strangely, Congress and the Obama administration have declared the revival of nuclear power as national policy and money has been appropriated for loan guarantees. But both are seeing their desires frustrated by OMB and its formula for calculating the chances of success or failure for new nuclear projects.

Angered by OMB intransigence, the two partners in Unistar, Constellation and EDF, have fallen out. EDF wants to go ahead, despite the difficulties and possibly with French government money. It may have to find a new American partner because a foreign company cannot own a U.S. nuclear plant outright.

Adding to the agony of the nuclear reactor builders is the changed picture for natural gas. There is now too much of it coming to market for utilities to ignore the attendant low price. At the inception of the new wave of interest in reactors, gas was selling for $7 to $8 for 1,000 cubic feet (a standard measure in gas pricing). Now it is bobbing around $4 for 1,000 cubic feet, which means that utilities are tempted by the low capital cost of gas turbines.

The joker is wild–and the joker is natural gas, aided by the OMB bureaucracy.

The nuclear renaissance may be delayed again in the United States, but 58 nuclear plants are under construction in 14 countries, including 24 in China alone.