Defense Secretary James Mattis’ unconventional choices for top Pentagon posts and his reluctance to aggressively push for dramatic increases in the defense budget have rankled Republicans on Capitol Hill who say he’s burning through political capital he needs as he begins reshaping the Pentagon.

Mattis was widely embraced on both sides of the aisle when President Donald Trump nominated him. Republicans and Democrats alike expressed hope that the retired four-star general would be a moderating force on the volatile commander in chief.


But Republican lawmakers and senior congressional aides said in recent interviews they’re running out of patience with Mattis' staffing decisions, which have disappointed Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee hoping to see their ideological allies elevated to senior levels in the Defense Department. Others are grumbling about Mattis’ refusal to advocate a bigger increase in the defense budget, which defense hawks believe was gutted disastrously under President Barack Obama.

“He certainly has got a tough job, but it sometimes feels like he forgets that we won the election,” said one aide to a GOP senator on the Armed Services Committee, who declined to speak on the record for fear of publicly alienating the defense secretary.

“We’ve waited eight years for this, to be able to fill these posts with Republicans,” said another top GOP Hill staffer. “We know Trump isn’t part of the establishment and that it’s going to be a bit different, but it should go without saying that a Republican administration is expected to staff federal agencies with Republicans.”

Mattis has bristled at nominating people with political backgrounds, including Randy Forbes, a former Virginia congressman who was considered for secretary of the Navy, and former Missouri Sen. Jim Talent, a Republican with expertise in defense policy, whose name has been floated for several senior defense posts. Senior members of the Republican foreign policy establishment had been pushing for the nominations of both men, neither of whom was openly critical of Trump during the campaign. Mattis has instead opted for deputies with backgrounds in law, diplomacy and business.

The defense secretary has also rankled Republicans with his efforts to hire veterans of Democratic administrations, pushing unsuccessfully to bring on Michèle Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration, as his deputy. He has more recently proposed to the White House nominating Clinton administration veteran Rudy DeLeon as undersecretary for personnel and readiness and Richard V. Spencer, a former Marine and investment banker now affiliated with the bipartisan Center for a New American Security, as secretary of the Navy.

The Defense Department did not respond to requests for comment.

The latest flash point between the secretary of defense and congressional Republicans came over Anne Patterson, a former diplomat appointed ambassador to Egypt under Obama whom Mattis wanted to nominate as his undersecretary for policy. Her nomination was officially scrapped last week after two GOP senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, waged a public campaign against her, explaining they weren’t comfortable with her willingness to engage with Egypt’s former Muslim Brotherhood-aligned government.

But the backstory is more complicated and provides a window into the botched political maneuvering that is hamstringing the defense secretary just two months into his tenure.

Weeks before Patterson's name was withdrawn, Cruz began circulating a letter opposing her nomination among Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The letter cited her work as Obama's ambassador to Egypt.

Cotton, increasingly a trusted voice on defense issues inside the West Wing, was more concerned with her lack of experience inside the Pentagon and conveyed his uneasiness to Vice President Mike Pence in a phone call earlier this month.

“Sen. Cotton was opposed to Anne Patterson’s nomination because of her lack of DOD-specific experience,” said Caroline Rabbitt, Cotton’s spokeswoman. “Ultimately, he got no assurances that she possesses the know-how to write strategic defense plans that combatant commanders would ultimately have to implement. He feels that the Pentagon should be focused on our obligation to build a GOP bench of national security.”

When Mattis learned about the Cruz letter and Cotton's call to Pence, he called Cotton and rebutted his criticisms, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. Mattis told Cotton that several Republicans were being considered for top Pentagon posts — and he invited the senator’s staffers over to see a closely held list of potential Defense Department appointees.

But the March 3 meeting went poorly. Kevin Sweeney, Mattis’ chief of staff, kept the Cotton staffers waiting and declined to invite them into his office, instead meeting with them briefly in an anteroom. He showed only a heavily redacted staff list and spent the meeting “barking” at the staffers before “storming out,” according to one national security source.

When Pence called Cotton days later, the senator relayed details from the meeting and signaled that he remained uneasy with Patterson’s nomination. “Had that meeting gone better, the vice president would have gotten a different message,” the national security source said. “Sweeney did more to sink Patterson than the Muslim Brotherhood did.” (Sweeney did not respond to requests for comment.)

Days later, Trump hosted Cruz and his wife at the White House. When Trump asked Cruz what he thought of Patterson, the Texas Republican reiterated his opposition to her appointment, multiple sources familiar with the meeting told POLITICO.

“That’s it,” Trump said, slapping his palm down on the wooden table, according to those sources. “Patterson’s out.” Moments later, an administration official placed a call to Mattis to inform him that he needed another nominee for the position.

Defense Department veterans say the White House has put Mattis in a nearly impossible position given that a large swath of the Republican foreign-policy establishment was openly critical of Trump during the campaign. Some say that has left Mattis with little choice but to turn to Democrats and to those without a political background to fill senior posts.

“In picking Mattis, the president got someone who had bipartisan credibility and was seen as a tough national security official who wasn’t going to toe the White House or the GOP line,” said Jeremy Bash, a former Pentagon spokesman under Secretary Leon Panetta. “Independence is an important attribute in a SecDef. But when you get that, you get frustration from the political folks. When you’re not coming out of the establishment, you have the credibility to do bipartisan things. You’re just going to take incoming from Democrats and from Republicans from time to time.”

The situation at the Pentagon mirrors that at the State Department, where many top positions, including the No. 2 spot under Secretary Rex Tillerson, remain unfilled after Trump scuttled the appointment of Elliott Abrams after learning that he criticized the then-GOP nominee last year.

The White House last week announced the nomination of Boeing vice president Pat Shanahan, a Washington outsider relatively unknown among defense policy experts, to be deputy secretary of defense. The announcement included four other high-level Department of Defense appointments, many of them Pentagon veterans of past GOP administrations, in an effort to mollify Republicans on Capitol Hill.

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But that’s unlikely to quell criticism on Capitol Hill, where Republicans on the House and Senate armed services committees say Mattis' troubles extend beyond personnel. They are frustrated by his failure to wage a political battle to raise the Defense Department's budget beyond the 3 percent increase initially proposed by the White House — or to fight to roll back the Obama-era Budget Control Act, which strips $1 trillion from the Pentagon budget over a decade. Mattis has told associates he will make it up to them when he proposes his own budget in 2019, according to a source familiar with the conversations, but that does not satisfy Republican hawks concerned in part about whether their party's majorities will hold through 2018.

House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) tweeted at the president about his concerns last month. “Could not have a better leader than #SecDef Mattis, but…,” he wrote in the first of two tweets, “@RealDonaldTrump promise is facing Obama holdovers @DOD who have been fighting against rebuilding & are still undermining agenda.” It was a tacit shot at Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work, the Obama holdover whom many Republicans blame for the secretary's failure to advocate for a bigger budget number.

Mike Gallagher, a Republican representative from Wisconsin, said that while Trump’s proposed budget cuts domestic programs in order to fund a $54 billion increase in military spending, it’s not enough to make up for past cuts. “I suspect Secretary Mattis — who understands how to connect ends, ways and means better than anyone—knows this and hope he will emerge as a forceful advocate for the rebuild,” Gallagher said.

Others said it’s crucial that Mattis embrace the reality of navigating the Hill. “Everybody thinks very highly of him, but he doesn’t have any political sense, and he doesn’t think he needs any political sense,” said one former Bush administration Defense Department official. “But it’s quintessentially a political job.”