Posted by Jay Livingston
In a post shortly after the election (here), I speculated that person holding the real power in White House policy decisions would be the chief of staff not the president.
Regardless of whose voice was loudest and most broadcast in the media or even who had the ultimate power to make decisions, what mattered was who controlled the information that would base his decisions on.
As it turned out, I was wrong. The theory may have been right, but Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, did not centralize the flow of information. According to an article in Politico today,
| White House aides say Priebus spent much of his time doing damage control and never instituted a holistic approach or managed to corral the flow of people and paper through the Oval Office. |
That may change. Priebus is out. The new chief of staff is John Kelly, who will try to be the kind of chief of staff I envisioned.
| In a conference call last week, Kelly initiated a new policymaking process in which just he and one other aide . . . will review all documents that cross the Resolute desk. The new system, laid out in two memos co-authored by Kelly and Porter and distributed to Cabinet members and White House staffers in recent days, is designed to ensure that the president won’t see any external policy documents, internal policy memos, agency reports and even news articles that haven’t been vetted. The keystone of the new system is a “decision memo” that will — for each Trump policy — integrate the input of Cabinet agencies and policy councils and present the president with various options, as well as with the advantages and drawbacks of each one. |
In such a system, who has more power – the person who chooses A or B, or the person who controls the content of A and B? If Kelly is successful, the “advantages and drawbacks” will be reduced to tweet-length decision memos that challenge neither Trump’s attention span nor his preference for avoiding complexity.
The advantage of having a powerful central person is efficiency. Things get done. The risk of centralization is a “groupthink” structure that excludes inconvenient but important ideas. That might be an improvement over the disorganized and ineffective administration we have seen for the past seven months. But it might also mean that the things that get done turn out to be disasters – disasters that a more open system might have avoided.
Another possibility is that even Kelly will not be able to close Trump off from other sources of information – television, family, and wealthy contributors.
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