The VP as Bureaucratic Fixer
It's All in the Game
I may not like what the administration is doing, but I respect game.1
Pressuring the Fed Chair through the National Capital Planning Commission? Brilliant.
Adding the GSA chief to the anti-Semitism Commission? Inspired. The GSA has expertise and data on grants and contracts, which can be used to pressure universities.
Most major presidential achievements are achieved by brute force, as the great presidential scholar, Stephen Skowronek, has observed, “the presidency is a battering ram.”
But sometimes, presidents use finesse, trick plays, or clever maneuvers. In his first term Trump was hobbled both by his own inexperience and a dearth of loyal and experienced staffers. This is no longer the case. Trump has been extraordinarily successful at both deploying the raw power of the presidency and identifying new levers and angles with which to pressure adversaries.
Trump is happy to bark out orders and now has staffers that make sure they are carried out. In his first term, Trump wanted to end our free trade agreement with South Korea, National Economic Advisor Gary Cohn removed the order from Trump’s desk so it couldn’t be signed. That wouldn’t happen in the current White House. Nor does Trump mind taking to social media to attack and pressure anyone that displeases him.
But it’s unlikely that Trump is personally diving into budgeting mechanisms or personnel issues to identify these new tools. More likely it is Office of Management and Budget chief Russ Vought, who spent the first Trump term at OMB, then spent the next four years plotting what he would do when he got back into office.
In the past, however, Vice Presidents often served in this capacity as bureaucratic fixers, but with his limited political experience, JD Vance is less equipped to fulfill this role.
VP Fixers
Normally, an insider VP can help identify innovative ways to get things done on behalf of the president. Cheney (a former White House chief of staff) was particularly brilliant at it. Besides Cheney’s well-known work on national security, he quarterbacked administration efforts to quash or work around environmental regulations that conflicted with administration priorities.
Cheney may have been a bureaucratic ninja, but other VPs were no slouches. Mondale recognized the value of foreign travel as a forcing mechanism to ensure initiatives and aid packages that were bogged down in the bureaucracy were pushed through. Bush Senior, as Reagan’s VP, ran task forces on both countering drugs and countering terror. In the former Bush brought together various agencies and military services to coordinate activity. In the case of the latter, the VP effectively inventoried the different government anti-terror programs so that the president would have better defined options. Gore ran the Reinventing Government program, which sought to make government work better at a grand scale.
While Pence was limited in his role as an advisor to Trump, his office expanded its role doing constituent service such as helping companies resolve issues they had with regulatory agencies.
Vance at the Museum
Vance has less DC experience than most recent VPs and thus less of the skill and knowledge needed to help break bureaucratic logjams. Vance may be using his statutory position on the Smithsonian Board of Regents to advance the administration’s goals of forcing them to conform to the Trumpist worldview.
Trump “fired” the director of the National Portrait Gallery, forced the National Museum of American History to revamp its exhibit on presidential impeachments (Trump holds the record with 2), and Amy Sherald, the artist famous for her portrait of Michelle Obama, withdrew her planned exhibit from the National Portrait Gallery. Sherald’s exhibit included a painting depicting the Statue of Liberty as a transgender person.
On the first point, Trump does not actually have the authority to fire anyone at the Smithsonian, or direct the museums in any way.2 The Smithsonian isn’t part of the executive branch. But the National Portrait Gallery Director, Kim Sajet, stepped down two weeks later. It is easy to imagine why public attacks from the president would induce a museum director to leave. Lawrence Powell is the head of an extremely powerful institution that commands a great deal of political support (he is also personally wealthy). He can afford to fight Trump. A Smithsonian museum director, or an artist, probably doesn’t need this kind of agita.
Presidents have longed used the bully pulpit to rally the public. Trump just uses it to bully. Here again, his use of the presidency and social media to do so is all too effective.
Coda with Art
My wife and I saw Amy Sherald: American Sublime (the exhibit in question) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC recently. So much exceptional work, it is unfortunate that it will not be seen here in DC. Here are a pair of the wonderful portraits of African-Americans that we will be missing. (This part of the post was mostly and excuse to share these pics.)
The subtitle “It’s all in the Game” refers to the 1951 No. 1 single by Tommy Edwards—which was set to “Melody in A Major,” composed by Charles Dawes in 1911. Later Dawes would become vice president. Having been Comptroller and head of the Bureau of the Budget, Dawes would have been a great bureaucratic fixer—but VPs were kept away from the president in those days. Anyway, the song was covered many times, but here is Edwards singing it.
Reportedly John Roberts, who as Chief Justice is the Chancellor of the Smithsonian, led the Board of Regents in rejecting the administration’s attempt to fire Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery.