Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan was cleared Thursday of any impropriety involving his former employer Boeing. Now, Administration sources say President Donald Trump will soon name the former aircraft company executive as permanent secretary of defense.
When and if the long-anticipated appointment of Shanahan occurs, Trump is also expected to send the name of Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist to the Senate for confirmation as the permanent Number Two at the Pentagon.
Shanahan, 56, was Deputy Secretary of Defense until he was moved up to the top job at the Pentagon last December following the resignation of then-Secretary James Mattis.
Trump has so far been adamant about keeping many appointees to the Cabinet and other high-level positions in an “acting” capacity — that is, not sending them to the Senate for confirmation.
As the President told reporters in January, “I like acting. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that?....We have a great, great Cabinet.”
But there are problems with this “acting” status.
As Paul Light, professor of public service at New York University, told The New York Times: “The Senate grappled with this question in the very first Congress when it ordered George Washington to send nominations to the Hill at a reasonable pace.”
Light explained that “senators rightly worried that presidents might use acting appointees to evade oversight and institutional prerogatives.”
Should Shanahan be appointed and confirmed, he will have the slimmest resume in public life of any secretary of defense since Proctor and Gamble President assumed the position in 1957. Shanahan has not served in the military nor had any national security experience aside from his two-year stint as Number Two official at the Pentagon.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.