美国国家公共电台 NPR Trump Has Many Jobs Unfilled; Is He 'Deconstructing The Administrative State'?

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President Trump 1 has yet to fill hundreds of senior-level positions throughout the government. He's questioned the need for, as he put it, all those jobs, but simply leaving post vacant may not be the best way to accomplish what his adviser 2 Stephen Bannon has called deconstructing the administrative 3 state. NPR's Brian Naylor has more.

BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE 4: When he spoke 5 last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, chief White House strategist Steve Bannon laid out three goals of the Trump presidency 6 - national security and sovereignty, economic nationalism and this.

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STEPHEN BANNON: The third, broadly, line to walk is what is deconstruction of the administrative state.

NAYLOR: Let's deconstruct that term for a moment.

JOSEPH POSTELL: The term administrative state is typically used to describe overregulation.

NAYLOR: Joseph Postell teaches political science at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and has written about the topic.

POSTELL: Sometimes it's even used to describe the rise of administrative agencies and the number of agencies that we have.

NAYLOR: There are some 1,100 executive branch jobs that require Senate confirmation 7, and so far Trump has nominated just a handful. For instance, none of the deputy secretaries or undersecretaries at the Department of State have been named. The number three job at the Pentagon is unfilled. Two key posts overseeing Trump's immigration crackdown are held by acting 8 directors. No FEMA director or TSA administrator 9 has been named. And other high level posts at the Treasury 10, the Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services also remain vacant. Paul Light, a professor of public service at NYU, calls this a necklace government. The agency heads are in place, but little more.

PAUL LIGHT: When you have a necklace government, when you're missing all those positions between the Cabinet secretaries and the sort of day-to-day work of government, government is basically frozen.

NAYLOR: But maybe the president wants it that way. This is what he told Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends" last week.

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POSTELL: A lot of those jobs I don't want to appoint because they're unnecessary to have. You know, we have so many people in government, even me - I look at some of the jobs, and it's people over people over people. I say - what do all these people do? You don't need all those jobs.

NAYLOR: Light says the federal leadership hierarchy 11 has been thickening, as he puts it, for the last 50 years. But he adds if Trump wants to change that, he's going about it the wrong way.

LIGHT: He's making a mistake if he thinks that leaving many of these positions open is going to enhance his control of government. It doesn't. I'm a believer in flattening 12 the federal hierarchy, but I do not think you do it by accident.

NAYLOR: Joseph Postell says administrative state critics believe that federal agencies have grown too big and also have too much power, including the power to essentially 13 write their own laws. He notes this is not new.

POSTELL: The size of government and the amount of regulation that we have in America has always been an object of dispute, going all the way back to Hamilton and Jefferson in the 1790s. What has changed that is given rise to the administrative state is essentially the accumulation of all these powers in the hands of people who are not directly elected by the people.

NAYLOR: So it may be that Trump is trying to return power to lawmakers from what critics often call unelected bureaucrats 14. But Postell says dismantling 15 the administrative state requires Congress to act to rein 16 in agencies and won't be achieved simply by leaving important government posts unfilled. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.