In the first week of his administration, President Joe Biden has been filling the available political appointee jobs in the federal government at a blistering pace, as well as dismissing holdovers from the Trump presidency, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
All across the federal government’s departments and agencies, Biden’s appointees have rapidly taken over, as the new president came prepared with detailed plans of who would fill each position.
This includes, for example, immediately putting staff members in place at the National Security Council, slots that sometimes take months to fill.
Biden has “nearly doubled the number of staff ready to start and onboarded than either Trump did in 2017 or Obama in 2009,” according to a White House statement, stressing “the urgent need to build — in some cases rebuild — capabilities like climate, cyber, global health security and biodefense, and democracy from the ground up.”
The contrast is striking with the Trump administration, which intentionally left positions unfilled in a desire to shrink what the former president called the “Deep State.”
According to the Times, Trump’s strategy of trying to figure out how to significantly cut staff at places like the State Department meant that there was significantly less time spent on developing policy toward even such important issues as China or Russia.
Other examples of Biden quickly filling positions in the federal government bureaucracy are at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Health and Human Services, which had been largely ignored or hollowed out by the Trump administration.