WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump is moving to repudiate vast parts of President Barack Obama’s domestic agenda as he fills his Cabinet with conservatives who have long records opposing the current administration on social programs, wages, public lands, veterans and the environment.
Trump’s selections to lead the Education, Commerce, Justice and health departments — and the names under consideration for other federal agencies with broad authority over the lives of Americans — have cheered Republicans in Washington, who have spent eight years battling Obama’s administration.
“It’s a recognition that elections have consequences,” said Thomas M. Davis, a former congressman from Virginia, who said he was impressed by the ideological philosophy of Trump’s domestic agency appointments. “Republican philosophy says markets can do a better job. It’s a huge clash with Obama.”
Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesPresident-elect Donald Trump gets off the elevator and walks toward reporters at Trump Tower December 6, 2016 in New York City.
Early Monday morning, Trump announced that he intended to nominate Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, to be the secretary of housing and urban development.
In that post, Carson, who enthusiastically backed Trump’s candidacy after dropping his own, will oversee the federal agency that fights urban blight, provides rental assistance and helps homeowners battle foreclosures.
If he is confirmed, Carson will embrace a starkly different approach to those problems, compared with housing secretaries during Obama’s tenure. He opposes government programs that he says encourage “dependency,” and he has been fiercely critical of housing programs intended to end segregation.
“These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse,” Carson wrote last year, describing the Obama administration’s efforts to promote fair housing practices as dangerous “social-engineering schemes.”
AP Photo/Gerald HerbertIn this Aug. 25, 2016, file photo, former Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson speaks before Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's arrival at a campaign rally in Manchester, N.H.
Carson joins a growing cast of nominees who, if confirmed, will assume control of hundreds of thousands of federal employees as they seek to shift policies developed during nearly a decade of Democratic governance.
Aside from his focus on immigration and the Affordable Care Act, Trump spent little time on the campaign trail detailing a specific policy agenda. But many of his nominees have spent their careers advocating positions that will now become the focus of examination during their confirmation hearings. Taken together, they suggest an administration determined to alter course on immigration, abortion, housing laws, the environment, worker protections and privatization of federal functions.
“We will learn a lot more during the hearings,” said Michael R. Strain, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Certainly, I think it’s different than what we’ve seen in the last eight years.”
Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesPresident-elect Donald Trump gets into the elevator after speaking to reporters at Trump Tower December 6, 2016 in New York City.
Trump’s personnel decisions for prominent national security jobs — attorney general, defense secretary, national security adviser, CIA director — have already begun to more firmly establish the contours of his approach to foreign policy, even as he struggles to settle on someone to be the nation’s top diplomat as secretary of state.
On the domestic front, announcements of several Cabinet posts are helping to define the new president’s approach to issues at home. His choices so far suggest a more conservative approach to many domestic issues than Trump himself articulated during the campaign.
This week, Trump is expected to fill a series of positions that will accelerate the U-turn from current policies.
He is said to be seriously considering Mary Fallin, Oklahoma’s Republican governor, for interior secretary, which would presage a shift away from the department’s current approach toward energy and public lands. Obama has aggressively sought to shut down fossil fuel production and increase the use of renewable sources of energy, while Fallin is an outspoken proponent of drilling and fracking on public lands. She was the first governor to announce she would oppose Obama’s proposed rules on emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Steve Sisney/The Oklahoman via APOklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin gets a third level scaffolding tour of the exterior renovation at the State Capitol on Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2016, in Oklahoma City.
Andrew F. Puzder, a wealthy California donor to Trump’s campaign whose company, CKE Restaurants, oversees chains such as Hardee’s, is said to be a leading candidate for labour secretary. Puzder has been extremely critical of the Obama administration’s labor policies, including its push for a higher minimum wage and for new overtime rules for workers.
On his personal blog, Puzder has been vocal in his criticism of Obama and, more recently, laudatory of Trump. His latest post, titled “Overregulation has hurt the restaurant industry, jobs & the economy but Trump’s win will reverse that narrative,” argues that current policy has led to a “government-mandated restaurant recession.”
And former Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., may get the nod to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs. Brown, who met with the president-elect last month about taking the job, might reverse the current administration’s opposition to privatizing parts of the department.
Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesFormer Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown leaves Trump Tower on November 21, 2016 in New York City. President-elect Donald Trump and his transition team are in the process of filling cabinet and other high level positions for the new administration.
“We’re going to have to outsource some of those cases to private vendors, obviously,” Brown told reporters at Trump Tower after his meeting. “We’ve got to work with the Department of Defense so when that soon-to-be-veteran actually leaves the DOD, we know what his or her needs are. There’s a breakdown there.”
A spokesman for Trump’s transition said Monday that several Cabinet announcements and White House staffing decisions were “likely” this week, following the president-elect’s recent picks to oversee the Education, Health and Human Services, Justice and Commerce Departments.
Last month, Trump announced that he had chosen Betsy DeVos to preside over the Education Department. DeVos, a longtime Republican fundraiser, has spent nearly 30 years pushing for families to receive public funds to send their children to private and parochial schools, usually to the consternation of teacher unions.
She is certain to challenge the approach that Obama and his administration have followed, often with the support of those same unions. After being chosen by Trump, she wrote on her Facebook page, “The status quo in ed is not acceptable.”
AP Photo/Alex BrandonHouse Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., President-elect Donald Trump's choice for Health and Human Services Secretary, delivers the keynote address at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution entitled "A Reform Agenda for the Federal Budget Process," Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2016 in Washington.
Trump’s choice to take over the Department of Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., is a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act and supported legislation to block federal funds for Planned Parenthood.
His pick for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor, is likely to echo the president-elect’s views on trade. That would give him the ability to shift U.S. policy away from the pro-trade approach that Obama embraced.
And Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trump’s pick to be the next attorney general, has long been a fierce advocate of a crackdown on immigrants who are in the country illegally. He was one of the most vocal opponents of an immigration overhaul, calling it amnesty. And in speeches from the floor of the Senate, he railed against Obama’s executive actions aimed at protecting some immigrants from deportation.
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These choices have put Democrats and liberal activists on notice that the agenda in Washington is changing, Davis, the former congressman, said. “This is clearly not going to be pleasing to them,” he said.
In a statement last week, Richard L. Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, said as much, reflecting on Trump’s Cabinet nominations with dismay and predicting, or perhaps hoping, that Americans would reject the direction of his government as too extreme.
“Donald Trump the candidate claimed he would rein in the power of Wall Street traders, protect Social Security and Medicare, and ensure all kids have great schools,” Trumka said. “But his Cabinet choices send a dangerous signal about how President-elect Trump will conduct his presidency.”