As President-elect Donald Trump has started announcing names for his cabinet to put in front of the Senate for approval, rumors have been rampant and nominations have dropped daily since the election win. We decided to take a look at just a few of them.
DOGE: Running government like a business
If “government efficiency” sounds like a contradiction in terms, welcome to the new U.S. reality. Trump on Tuesday announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency—DOGE, for short, with a wink to the meme crowd—led by Elon Musk and Republican presidential primary challenger and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
On TruthSocial and X, Trump described the new department’s task as to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” DOGE will have “an entrepreneurial approach to Government never seen before,” he said.
It will become, potentially, “The Manhattan Project” of our time. Republican politicians have dreamed about the objective of “DOGE” for a very long time.”
Musk, who famously fired 80% of employees to increase efficiency when he took over Twitter and turned it into X, appears to take the entrepreneurial approach seriously. His suggested approach is one of carrot and stick for government employees:
Incentives matter. There should be rewards for wise spending, but those who waste taxpayer funds cannot be allowed to keep doing so without consequences.
Republican activist and co-founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk described the idea as “a profound, historic step back to the Founders’ vision for America.”
Dual Bronze Star recipient to lead the military
For the heavy post of Secretary of Defense, the nomination of Pete Hegseth was—unsurprisingly and unfairly—ridiculed by the Left. MSNBC host Joy Reid described Trump’s cabinet as a “clown car” and said he had selected “Fox weekend morning show host” Hegseth for the position. There’s quite a bit more to Hegseth than that, which Reid of course knows. A Princeton and Harvard grad whose military service in Iraq and Afghanistan earned him two Bronze Stars and two Army Commendation medals, Hegseth dedicated his post-military career to veterans’ advocacy before joining Fox as a commentator in 2014.
Asked on the Shawn Ryan Show on November 7th, before his nomination, how he could see reforming the U.S. military leadership, Hegseth said,
Any general that was involved, general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the DEI woke sh*t has got to go. …Either you’re in for war fighting and that’s it. That’s the only litmus test we care about. You got to get DEI and CRT out of military academies.
Elizabeth Warren, leftist Democrat senator from Massachusetts, found it appropriate to question Hegseth’s qualifications and claim the selection of “a Fox & Friends weekend co-host“ “will make us less safe and must be rejected.”
A Trump supporter from Spain, however, quipped on X, “Imagine telling yourself in 2016 that the Secretary of Defense under the second (third?) Trump administration has a ‘Deus Vult’ tattoo on his bicep.” [“Deus Vult”—“God wills it”—was the battle cry of 11th-century Christian crusaders.]
Securing the border
If VP Kamala Harris didn’t do much as ‘border czar’—except dance with deportation protesters in Los Angeles—there’s a new sheriff in town who will be singing from a different sheet of music. Tom Homan, a 30-plus-years law enforcement veteran with a past in the Border Patrol and as head of now-defunct Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE. Trump described Homan as someone who “looks very nasty, he looks very mean. That’s what I’m looking for.”
In speeches on the campaign trail, interviews, and congressional testimony, Homan has proven to be a no-nonsense straight-talker. On “60 Minutes,” when asked if there is a way to carry out mass deportations without separating families, Homan responded, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”
Homan will work closely with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Despite her state not being anywhere close to a U.S. border, Gov. Noem deployed South Dakota National Guard troops to assist Texas with border control a total of eight times.
Israel supporters picked for ambassador posts
Selecting former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for U.S. ambassador to Israel and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik for UN ambassador is evidence of Trump’s strong support for the only democracy in the Middle East.
The appointment of Huckabee, who has called himself a Zionist, may signal a break with previous U.S. administrations’ two-state solution. He has previously said the West Bank belongs to Israel and that “the title deed was given by God to Abraham and to his heirs,” rejecting the idea of the creation of a Palestinian state.
Congresswoman Stefanik, also a strong supporter of Israel, has been vocal in her criticism of the antisemitism on American college campuses that came to the surface after Hamas’ October 7th, 2023 attacks. Last week, she repeated her call for defunding UNRWA, the UN help agency banned by Israel last month after it was shown to be infiltrated by Hamas.
Stefanik was endorsed by AIPAC, the largest American pro-Israel lobbying group, which said she had “worked tirelessly for the release of the hostages in Gaza, and been a voice of moral clarity on Israel’s just war against Hamas.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of JStreet, a lobbying group that promotes a negotiated two-state solution, said the nominations “will trample our values and endanger Israelis and Palestinians” and called on Biden to “blunt the impact before he leaves office.”
The Senate has the final say
These are only a few of the nominated cabinet members who will have to face approval by the Senate. Typically, “the overwhelming majority of cabinet nominations have been confirmed quickly with little debate and often with simple voice votes,” the Senate process information says. Since 1868, Senate rules require nominations to be referred to “appropriate committees.” The committees make recommendations for approval or disapproval, and can also choose to not refer the nominee to the full Senate, effectively killing the nomination.
There’s been some scuttlebutt about this process. On social media, Trump said the incoming Senate Majority Leader (elected in a closed-ballot vote Wednesday, November 13th) “must agree” to allow him to make recess appointments—a way to avoid delays while the Senate is in adjournment or recess. Recess appointments expire at the end of the following congressional session. A 2014 Supreme Court decision (NLRB v. Canning) limited the power of the president to fill positions without Senate approval during short recesses.
