[Stephen] Miller often launches into pedantic arguments with others in the White House, citing lengthy, arcane statistics that he mentally stores like munitions. He reads "every economic analysis, every think tank paper, every Wall Street Journal editorial on immigration," said a colleague.
Once a skeptic about climate change, Jim Bridenstine came around to the prevailing view of scientists before he took over as NASA administrator. That evolution did not sit well with a Trump environmental adviser, nor a think-tank analyst he was consulting, according to newly disclosed emails that illustrate how skepticism of global warming has found a beachhead in the Trump White House.
“Puzzling,” says the May 2018 exchange between William Happer, now a member of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, and Thomas Wysmuller of the Heartland Institute, which disavows manmade climate change. Their exchange calls scientifically established rises in sea levels and temperatures under climate change “part of the nonsense” and urges the NASA head — who was copied in — to “systematically sidestep it.”
It cannot be discerned whether it was Happer or Wysmuller who put that pressure on the new NASA chief. Their exchange is included in emails from 2018 and 2019 that were obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund under the federal Freedom of Information Act and provided to The Associated Press.
President Donald Trump has kept White House visitor logs under wraps after eight years of transparency from President Barack Obama, but beginning this week voters will get a peek, at least, at the comings and goings on campus, POLITICO’s Lorraine Woellert reports. The Secret Service released a set of heavily redacted visitor logs Wednesday as part of a legal settlement between the Trump administration and watchdog group Public Citizen, which had sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain records of four agencies housed inside the White House compound: the offices of Management and Budget, Science and Technology Policy and National Drug Control Policy, and the Council on Environmental Quality.
The logs track visitors for the month of February, which included conservative think-tank types Myron Ebell and Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation and Jim Tozzi of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness. Trump administration loyalist C. Boyden Gray dropped in twice to chat with Mark Paoletta, the former veep chief counsel who’s now at OMB. Ellen Lurie Hoffman of the National Housing Trust paid a visit to OMB’s civil service wing.
Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass slammed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in a tweet on Wednesday, calling for him to step down from the nation's top diplomatic post.
"Rex Tillerson has been dealt a bad hand by the Potus & has played it badly. For both reasons he cannot be effective SecState & should resign," the think-tank's president said.
Haass's comments come as tensions appear to mount between Trump and Tillerson.
NBC News reported on Wednesday that Tillerson had mulled leaving his post this summer, and that top Trump administration officials, including Vice President Pence, urged him to stay in his post despite his growing frustration with Trump.
Senior officials walk through the building with funereal looks on their faces. Others complain that the White House is being "paralyzed" by the commotion. "He likes everyone always being on thin ice," explains one adviser of the President's management style. A few West Wing aides have begun to look for lifeboats, shopping résumés to think tanks, super PACs and corporate communications firms in the market for anyone who can make sense of the White House's bizarre workings. When news broke on May 15 that the President had revealed sensitive classified information to the Russian Foreign Minister and the Russian ambassador in an Oval Office meeting, one White House staffer sent a message to a friend outside the building: FML, read the text--abbreviated millennial slang for an unprintable curse on one's own life.
The White House is downplaying the importance of an internal policy shop that was once believed to be the brainchild and power center of chief strategist Stephen Bannon, saying the Strategic Initiatives Group (SIG) never even existed.
That appears to contradict media reports and the claims of at least one White House staffer who previously said that he was a member of the SIG.
The group — described in scores of media reports as an internal think tank launched by Bannon, chief of staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser Jared Kushner — would be irrelevant now even if it had formed, a White House aide said.
Any need there may have been for the internal policy shop, which critics have described as an attempt by Bannon to promote his own agenda, is moot now that President Trump has tapped Kushner to run the Office of American Innovation (OAI), which is charged with government modernization, according to multiple White House officials.
"I've never known [SIG] to exist,” said a White House aide. “There was a lot of speculation about this early, but it was never officially rolled out and if anything, the OAI is an evolution and realization of some of these initial ideas.”
A second White House official said the SIG was “always informal” and has since “morphed to the new group,” the OAI.
A third White House official echoed that sentiment but said it’s possible that Bannon could still use the SIG for his own projects.
President Trump plans to unveil a new White House office on Monday with sweeping authority to overhaul the federal bureaucracy and fulfill key campaign promises — such as reforming care for veterans and fighting opioid addiction — by harvesting ideas from the business world and, potentially, privatizing some government functions.
The White House Office of American Innovation, to be led by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, will operate as its own nimble power center within the West Wing and will report directly to Trump. Viewed internally as a SWAT team of strategic consultants, the office will be staffed by former business executives and is designed to infuse fresh thinking into Washington, float above the daily political grind and create a lasting legacy for a president still searching for signature achievements.
Kushner is positioning the new office as “an offensive team” — an aggressive, nonideological ideas factory capable of attracting top talent from both inside and outside of government, and serving as a conduit with the business, philanthropic and academic communities.
He sits in the White House at night, watching television or reading social media, and through Twitter issues instant judgments on what he sees. He channels fringe ideas and gives them as much weight as carefully researched reports. He denigrates the conclusions of intelligence professionals and then later denies having done so. He thrives on conflict and chaos.
The White House abruptly dismissed a senior National Security Council aide on Friday after receiving reports that he had publicly laced into the president and his senior aides, including son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump at an event hosted by a Washington think tank.
The aide, Craig Deare, was serving as the NSC's senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Earlier in the week, at a private, off-the-record roundtable hosted by the Woodrow Wilson Center for a group of about two dozen scholars, Deare harshly criticized the president and his chief strategist Steve Bannon and railed against the dysfunction paralyzing the Trump White House, according to a source familiar with the situation.
He complained in particular that senior national security aides do not have access to the president -- and gave a detailed and embarrassing readout of Trump's call with Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto.
...Stephen Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, are forming what is being loosely called the Strategic Initiatives Group, a mini-think tank within the White House comprising analysts who can grapple with large-scale issues like cybersecurity.
Such a group would have as many as a dozen strategists, and could help to centralize policy-making on some topics by Mr. Bannon and Mr. Kushner. Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, who knows Washington well and who works in conjunction with the two, is likely to run more of the day-to-day operations of the West Wing, according to one person involved in the planning.
The administration wasn’t impressed by a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, which calculates that a $177.9 billion trade deficit with the other TPP countries translates to 2 million lost jobs, arguing that the methodology has already been debunked.
“The method EPI uses to create these numbers was given ‘Four Pinocchios’ by The Washington Post’s independent fact-checker last year for being a ‘whopper’, yet they continue to use it,” a USTR spokesman said. “The International Trade Administration's most recent official numbers show that 11.7 million jobs were supported yearly by exports of American goods and that 45 percent of those goods went to TPP countries. It’s unfortunate that opponents of trade, like EPI, continue to use faulty data to avoid having an honest debate about expanding American made exports through TPP.”
Many trade economists argue that imports don’t have a straightforward impact on jobs because some of them are used as inputs in other products made here, and some don’t compete directly with U.S. goods.
Rob Scott, one of the authors of the EPI paper, said the methodology he used is similar in some ways to the Public Citizen methodology but not exactly the same. He also noted that, unlike Public Citizen, his paper used data from the Census Bureau on trade flows, which is considered by the administration to be the most accurate.USTR doesn't only rely on US think tanks to get its message across. For example, in a trip to Malaysia last year, USTR Michael Froman promoted the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) at a think tank event.