“When they hear [the White House is] looking carefully at people’s bona fides, I’m sure they are looking over their shoulder a little bit,” said Arnold Punaro, the former staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee and a retired Marine Corps major general.
Kathryn Wheelbarger, the department’s top acting official overseeing international security affairs, and Elaine McCusker, the acting comptroller, this week became the latest to fall victim to the purge, after Esper and his deputy, David Norquist, failed to salvage their nominations for permanent senior posts, according to two people with knowledge of the deliberations.
Wheelbarger submitted her resignation on Wednesday, less than a week after the White House nixed her nomination to be the Pentagon’s No. 2 official overseeing military intelligence over loyalty concerns, according to five people familiar with the move. White House officials took issue with her association with former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — who resigned in protest of Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria in 2018 and recently issued a blistering public criticism of the president — and the late Sen. John McCain, who feuded publicly with Trump before his death in 2018, POLITICO previously reported.
The news of Wheelbarger’s resignation, which the Pentagon confirmed late Thursday, comes two days after McCusker also announced she would step down, following the White House’s decision to pull her nomination to be permanent comptroller. McCusker questioned last summer’s freeze on military aid to Ukraine, which was at the heart of Trump’s impeachment.
The departures follow the ouster of John Rood, the Pentagon’s top policy official until February, and Glenn Fine, the department’s acting inspector general, who resigned in May after Trump effectively removed him as chairman of a committee overseeing $2 trillion in emergency coronavirus funding.
Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman said Esper and his team have been working with the White House since Esper entered office to identify and fill vacant senior positions. Hoffman noted that since last July, the Senate has confirmed 14 positions — 11 unanimously — and hired 38 members of the senior executive service, with another 34 appointees in the queue. Of the total leadership positions in DoD, 80 percent are filled, and another 14 percent have been hired against, he said.
“We have seen many of these positions filled and are in a far better place with regard to staffing levels than we were last summer,” Hoffman said. “The secretary has been focused on identifying and recruiting well-qualified and capable candidates to DoD.”
A spokesperson for the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The purge is affecting all federal agencies, not just DoD. But the White House’s withdrawal of several DoD nominees serves as a reminder to senior Pentagon officials, both political appointees and career civil servants, not to cross a president who’s keeping score.
“If there was any thought in their minds that the White House wasn’t paying attention, I think that’s cleared that up pretty quickly,” said a third person familiar with discussions who spoke on condition of anonymity. “From that standpoint, it reinforces a reminder of who they all work for.”
Experts worry that the loyalty purge will cost the Pentagon talent and institutional memory, and further stretch the officials who remain as the department struggles to fill more than a dozen senior positions.
“This kind of churn is generally bad because the wider the cracks are, the more things fall through the cracks,” said Lindsay Cohn, an associate professor at the Naval War College, who was speaking in a personal capacity.
The campaign also further politicizes critical Pentagon jobs, Cohn said.
“Obviously political appointments are politicized in the sense that they need to be people the president trusts and feels will faithfully carry out his agenda, but these are also positions of public trust and service,” Cohn said. “Mr. Trump is making it very clear that he has no room for even mild dissent, and that he has no desire to include anyone but true loyalists in his government.”
It also may have a chilling effect on qualified people who are considering jobs in the Pentagon.
“I’ve never seen something quite like this before,” said one former senior DoD official who served in the Obama administration. “There are good qualified experienced people who are no longer interested in the opportunity to serve because they don’t want to expose themselves to a situation like this. It does put a real chill on the environment for people.”
The two latest resignations come amid brewing tension between the White House and the Pentagon. Both Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, angered the president on two fronts this month: first when they distanced themselves from his threat to deploy active-duty troops to quash protests in the nation’s capital, and later when they expressed support for an effort to rename Army bases named after Confederate generals, a move Trump opposes.
Esper and Milley seemed to have weathered the storm by Friday, with Trump telling Fox News that “If that’s the way they feel, I think that’s fine.”
Yet the situation raises questions as to how forcefully Pentagon leaders — especially Esper — can push back against a White House focused on rooting out those considered not loyal enough to Trump.
The high-profile ousters began with Rood in February, after John McEntee, the new director of the White House’s Office of Presidential Personnel, embarked on a campaign to vet political appointees and career officials for their loyalty to the president.
“Johnny McEntee — that’s really the only name that matters as far as PPO goes,” said one former White House official familiar with the discussions.
In certain cases, even the appearance of disloyalty is enough to harm the careers of officials. White House and Pentagon officials who were asked about Wheelbarger could not point to specific issues they had with her performance; current and former officials told POLITICO the tension was simply her ties to Mattis and McCain.
Esper had nothing but praise for Wheelbarger after news broke about her resignation Thursday.
“Katie brought a wealth of experience and the utmost professionalism to the Department throughout her service. Her leadership in support of the National Defense Strategy is evident in the proud accomplishments of her team,” Esper said. “She is someone I got to know well over the last three years and, with sincere appreciation for her many contributions and years of service, I wish Katie the very best in what I’m sure will be a very bright future.”
The White House, meanwhile, has also made efforts to insert Trump loyalists at the Pentagon’s upper echelon, including nominating retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata to replace Rood, and appointing Michael Cutrone, a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence, to be deputy assistant secretary of Defense for security cooperation.
Tata was not Esper’s first choice for the position; he initially wanted to nominate Elbridge Colby, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense under Mattis.
Tata is particularly controversial. A series of inflammatory tweets he made two years ago on Islam and unearthed by CNN caught the attention of Democratic and Republican senators, as well as at least three prominent retired generals, who reportedly have dropped their support for him.
Former Trump officials decried the decision to demote Wheelbarger, who has served as acting assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs since November 2018 and is one of the Pentagon’s most prominent officials, recently appearing before Congress to discuss the wars in Syria and Afghanistan.
“Katie Wheelbarger is one of the most talented and dedicated public servants with whom I’ve ever had the privilege to serve. It is a mistake not to promote her to higher levels of service at this time,” said Randy Schriver, who served as assistant secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific affairs until early this year.
Mick Mulroy, who was the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Middle East policy until December, said Wheelbarger is “one of the hardest working, smartest and talented people I have worked with in government.”
“She should have been confirmed for the job she so ably did for over a year and a half,” Mulroy added.
Source: politico.com
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