White House chief of staff John Kelly is giving Cabinet secretaries more autonomy to pick top political appointees, reversing efforts under his predecessor Reince Priebus to run most appointments through the West Wing.

Kelly’s goal, according to 10 interviews with White House officials and advisers close to the administration, is to do a better job of finding candidates for the hundreds of jobs throughout the administration that remain vacant almost nine months into President Donald Trump’s first term.


“Being somebody from the Department of Defense, normally you’ve got key people in place and a clear chain of command,” said Leon Panetta, a former White House chief of staff himself and former Secretary of Defense, who spoke to Kelly around the time he accepted the White House job. “It’s very difficult to run anything if you don’t have people responsible in those positions.”

Kelly entered the White House with an unusually clear understanding of the flaws of the personnel process, according to two people close to him.

As a Cabinet pick and then as Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kelly was frequently exasperated during the transition and early days of the administration over his inability to choose his own staff. He got into frequent spats with the White House over filling a handful of top jobs in his department, according to one of the people close to him.

Other Cabinet secretaries, including Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have had their own problems with the White House personnel office, with Mattis trying to circumvent it and hire his own staff.

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“Look, everyone in the White House is upset. It’s both a problem of getting candidates through the bureaucracy and through the Senate. Of course Kelly is upset,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an informal adviser to Trump whose wife, Callista, has been nominated as Trump’s Vatican ambassador. “The whole system is totally screwed up.”

Part of the problem stems from the Trump administration’s criteria for hiring staffers and top political appointees. Potential candidates must be loyal to the administration and not have spoken harshly about the president during the campaign.

That has created a particular problem when it comes to filling national security jobs, because scores of Republican experts, many of whom served in the George W. Bush administration, signed a letter criticizing the future president before the election.

Many experienced Republicans who ordinarily would have vied for middle- and top-level posts under a Republican president also decided to sit out the Trump administration in January, starving the president of choices when it came to picking appointees.

The president himself seems willing to tolerate vacancies indefinitely.

“I’m generally not going to make a lot of the appointments that would normally be – because you don’t need them,” Trump told Forbes in an interview which posted last week. “I mean, you look at some of these agencies, how massive they are, and it’s totally unnecessary. They have hundreds of thousands of people.”

The White House press office did not respond to requests for comment.

Filling vacant jobs has taken on particular urgency in recent weeks, as the White House contends with thorny policy questions such North Korea’s growing nuclear might and the fate of the Iran deal. The administration is also trying to re-negotiate the NAFTA trade agreement and roll back parts of Obamacare through regulations and executive orders.

At the State Department, more than 78 jobs do not have a nominee out of 149 key positions, and 32 countries still don’t have ambassadors in place, according to data kept by the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service.

The Treasury Department has 15 key slots open out of 28 significant Senate confirmed positions as the White House dives into selling tax reform.

Just last week, Treasury announced it would not fill its No. 2 deputy secretary slot after a second candidate dropped out of the running for it.

Kelly’s own former job remains open two and a half months after he moved to the White House, with Trump nominating Kelly’s No. 2 Kirstjen Nielsen this week after other potential nominees were passed over.

The Department of Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for overseeing the Affordable Care Act, lacks a Cabinet secretary after former Rep. Tom Price resigned after spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to charter private jets for government trips.

So far, the Senate has confirmed roughly 142 political appointees out of the 602 key jobs throughout the government, according to the Partnership for Public Service.

The presidential personnel office also got off to a rocky start. Its director Johnny DeStefano, who started right after the inauguration, had to find candidates for hundreds of key Senate-confirmed jobs without an existing pool of applicants after the administration discarded lists compiled by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was fired as transition head days after the election in November.

DeStefano also entered the job with no formal experience in executive recruiting or hiring. Previously, he worked for House Speaker John Boehner and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

At the White House, both Priebus and Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, were seen as his high-level protectors. Their departures this summer have left DeStefano adrift inside Kelly’s new power structure, according to two people close to the administration.

Kelly recently asked DeStefano to oversee the Office of Public Liaison, whose head George Sifakis left in August following Priebus’ ouster.

DeStefano, who also retains his title as head of the personnel office, did not respond to requests for comment.

Outside conservative activists and groups are no longer blaming Senate Democrats for holding up confirmations.

Last week, over 100 conservatives released a letter to remind both the administration and Capitol Hill that “personnel is policy.”

The letter demands that Senate leadership schedule committee and floor action every Thursday and Friday and to work full weeks until Trump’s nominees get confirmed. Among the signatories are Edwin Meese, former Attorney General under Ronald Reagan; Becky Norton Dunlop, a former Reagan adviser who worked on the Trump transition; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, and Adam Brandon, President of FreedomWorks.

Republicans say that the slow pace of appointments impedes Trump’s agenda. It ends up leaving much of the agency-level, or diplomatic work to government careerists who aren’t necessarily supportive of the Trump agenda.

“The career people know how to keep the government going and respond to citizens, but if there is any desire to change what the government is doing, that is most effectively done if it is being led by a political appointee,” said Clay Johnson, who oversaw presidential personnel under Bush. “So without the hundreds of political appointees at each of the key agencies, the administration of government will continue, but it will be hard for the Trump administration to change or eliminate something, or create something new.”

