GRAND STRATEGY MAKERS (GSMs) IN THE U.S. PRESIDENCY

The Dutch political scientists Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Nana de Graaff from the Free University of Amsterdam recently constructed a richly detailed career profile of the US presidency’s top "grand strategy makers" (GSMs), holders of key policymaking Cabinet and senior advisory positions- over the administrations of the 42nd, 43rd and 44th Presidents: Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-09) and Barack Obama (2009-17).

By van Apeldoorn and de Graaff’s calculations, 23 (more than 70 percent) of Obama’s top 30 GSMs had “top-level corporate affiliations”- executive, director, senior adviser or partner in a law firm - prior to their appointment to the US executive branch. These 23 were linked through a combination of board memberships, executive positions and advisory roles to 111 corporations. These “affiliations in many cases display a revolving door pattern, indicating that the actors are not just closely tied to but actually themselves members of the corporate elite.

This oligarchic composition of top White House personnel is hardly unique to the age of Obama. Twenty-one (70 percent) of Bush II’s GSMs (linked to 87 corporations) and 18 (60 percent) of Clinton’s GSMs (linked to 48 corporations) held such elite corporate stations.

The numbers get worse when you include GSMs who took such positions after they served in those presidencies. Broadened that way, the numbers for Clinton are 25 of 30 (83 percent) linked to 197 corporations and 27 of 30 (90 percent) linked to 157 companies for George W. Bush. By last year, seven former Obama GSMs had rotated back into top corporate roles after their White House stints.

The leading faction of capital represented in these GSM positions across the last three two-term presidencies is the financial sector and is overwhelmingly linked to “transnationally oriented capital.” Van Apeldoorn and de Graaff find that the “overall composition of the corporate background of these grand strategy makers” is “broad in terms of sectors,” with “US transnationally oriented capital” in the lead and “the financial sector predominat[ing] among the corporate links of all three administrations.” Finance’s prevailing role indicates the global orientation of the Fortune 500 interests that hold sway in the US presidency, “as financial capital is by definition more transnationally mobile than productive capital.” The legal and consultancy firms (e.g., Kissinger Associates) that have together provided more than a fifth of all GSMs since 1993 principally represent multinational corporations and investment firms.

The revolving door between top corporate/financial and government positions and the promise of heightened remuneration in the “private” sector (after one does Big Business’ bidding while “serving” in the “public” one) is a very big and often underestimated part of this overall system of class rule. Also unduly neglected is the role that elite neoliberal and corporate-financial-networked policy planning bodies play in staffing, socializing, solidifying and doctrinally schooling top US executive branch personnel. The key institutions here are the

• The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
• The Trilateral Commission,
• The Bilderberg Group,
• The Rand Corp.,
• The Aspen Institute,
• The Atlantic Council,
• The Brookings Institution,
• The Center for Strategic and International Studies,
• The Peterson Institute for International Economics,
• The Hoover Institution,
• The Carnegie Corporation of New York/Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
• The Rockefeller Foundation,
• The Foreign Policy Association,
• The Committee for Economic Development and
• The Bretton Woods Committee.

These core policy organizations (with the CFR in the lead) share three basic properties: a strong commitment to the domestic and global “Open Door” expansion (non-territorial but not without considerable reliance on the US and US-sponsored military force) of American transnational “free market” capitalism (corporate, state and financial); principal funding by transnationally oriented Fortune 500 corporations and financial institutions; the ubiquitous presence of their top personnel both in the elite “private” (corporate, financial and legal) sector and in White House GSM positions.

Of Obama’s 30 GSMs, van Apeldoorn and de Graaff find, fully 25 (83 percent) held prior top affiliations with one or more of these planning groups, totaling 162 such affiliations. The elite policy groups’ presence was slightly higher in the Clinton White House (26/209) and similar in the Bush presidency (22/211).

Another part of the not-so-popular profile for those who become GSMs, supposedly planning domestic and foreign policy on behalf of “we the people” in the US presidency, is training at one or more of the nation’s and world’s elite ruling-class universities, where neoliberal ideology and values prevail. Twenty-five of Obama’s (himself Harvard Law-pedigreed) first 38 Cabinet and top advisory picks had a degree from an Ivy League university, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Oxford or Cambridge.

Would things be any different in a Hillary Clinton White House? One would have to be very naive to think so. It’s not for nothing that Hillary Clinton is known on Wall Street as “Lady Klynton Kissinger Sachs.” The consistently war-hawkish Clinton is the quintessential power-elite and ruling-class insider. She was minted and socialized at such ruling-class institutions as Oxford, Yale Law, Rose Law, the Walmart board of directors, the Democratic Leadership Council (dedicated to pushing the Democratic Party further to the corporate-friendly right during the 1980s and 1990s), the White House (eight years as a highly policy-empowered first lady), the globalist Clinton Foundation, the CFR and the US State Department. She and her husband “operate in a world awash in money and connections. She is the candidate of campaign finance and of (exorbitant) speaking-fee choice for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, the CFR, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange etc.

But it’s not just about Hillary Clinton. It takes a ruling-class village to make policy for the few in the name of the many. Clinton’s vice presidential pick, Tim Kaine, is a financial-sector darling who backed fast-tracking the arch-global corporatist, Wall Street-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Her campaign manager, John Podesta, is a legendary ruling-class inside-outsider. A former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, Podesta has headed a major Washington, DC, lobbying firm whose clients have included BP, Citigroup, Walmart and Lockheed Martin. He founded the Center for American Progress (CAP), which has become a virtual policy arm of the neoliberal Obama White House and after Obama appointed him as a special adviser in December of 2013 — “taken millions of dollars in corporate donations and has its own team of lobbyists who have pushed an agenda that sometimes echoes the interests of those corporate supporters.” The CAP poses as a “progressive,” even “left-leaning” alternative to right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, but it really embodies a kind of reconstructed “Third Way neoliberalism” that is deeply captive to global corporate and financial interests. Podesta also is president of the Clinton-Kaine Transition Project.

Clinton’s presidential transition team is what the liberal-left political commentator and activist Norman Solomon calls “a corporate presidency foretold.” Besides Podesta, the team’s chair is Salazar, a former US senator who strongly supports the highly unpopular TPP and angered environmentalists and cheered Big Carbon by backing offshore drilling and fracking during his years as Obama’s Secretary of the Interior. He’s a partner at WilmerHale, one of the world’s most politically powerful law firms, representing multinational capital at home and abroad — making him another example of the revolving-door phenomenon.

Also on Clinton’s transition leadership team is Donilon, a member of the Bilderberg Group’s steering committee. After serving as Obama’s national security adviser from late 2010 through the spring of 2013, he became a distinguished fellow at the CFR and resumed his prior longstanding position as a partner in the leading multinational corporate law firm O’Melveny & Myers.

Other senior Clinton transition officials are longstanding, Democratic Leadership Council-style operatives. Neera Tanden (a Yale Law graduate and president of the CAP), Maggie Williams (partner in a leading Washington, DC, management consulting firm and former director of a top mortgage lending firm that collapsed in late 2007) and Harvard Law graduate Jennifer Granholm (whose pro-Big Business record as a two-term Michigan governor helped score her lucrative positions on the boards of Universal Forest Products Inc. and Dow Chemical).

According to William K. Black, who has held top federal regulatory positions, what we are seeing in this group “is complete domination by what used to be the Democratic Leadership Council. Very, very right-wing foreign policy. What they call a muscular foreign policy … a euphemism for invading places. Very, very tough on crime … [and pro-] mass incarceration. And the economic side, all in favour of austerity. All in favour of privatization. And of course, all in favour of things like NAFTA.” It’s no small matter. “The transition team,” Black notes, “is the one that is both deciding what are going to be U.S. policy priorities in the magic — again a cliché — first 100 days? 

The next president will make more than 4,000 political appointments to fill out the executive branch including more than 1,000 jobs requiring Senate confirmation. Filling such a large number of presidential appointments, including members of the Cabinet, the White House staff and top policy and management positions at each federal agency, requires immense capacity, organization and discretion within the transition team’s presidential personnel office. The appointments team is often among the largest within a presidential transition organization. During the transition, the appointments team should be structured around groups focused on different policy or governance areas, such as national security, economic affairs, health care, education and internal management. Because of the sensitivity of the nomination and appointments process, the appointments team should be housed separately from the rest of the transition office. The appointments staff should work closely with both the policy and agency review teams to identify priority positions based on the policy agenda of the new administration and to generate lists of candidates for each agency based on their particular needs and issues.

To accomplish these goals, the appointments team’s work should begin in the pre-election period and continue through the election, the inauguration and the first year of the administration to identify and vet—through both public and non-public means—candidates for key agency roles.

White House positions are especially important, and staffing the White House is largely the domain of the incoming chief of staff. These positions do not require Senate confirmation, but play a critical role in building the rest of the administration. The White House should be fully staffed before the inauguration.

The appointments team is responsible for recommending Cabinet members as well as individuals for undersecretary and assistant secretary positions, and other critical management jobs. The top 100 leadership positions, including the Cabinet secretaries, should be filled soon after the inauguration. Another 300 critical positions throughout federal agencies should be filled by the congressional recess in August, roughly 200 days into the new administration.

The appointments team also must develop a system for identifying, screening and processing lower level political appointees, such as Schedule C or non-career Senior Executive Service positions.

Based on these targets, the activities of the appointments team should begin as early as late spring of the election year with the selection of an appointments director. By August, the appointments team should have developed rough lists of candidates for agency heads and other key positions, and should begin the initial vetting process of candidates using public sources. The period between the election and the inauguration will be a sprint as the appointments team prepares nominees for their Senate confirmation hearings and works with General Services Administration and outside experts to provide all political appointees with a robust orientation program. The presidential appointments team should set internal milestones guiding how many and which key positions it will try to fill at different points in the transition process.

Best practice generally dictates having White House positions filled by Thanksgiving, and the most important Cabinet positions ready to announce between Thanksgiving and Christmas so that the nominees will have time to be briefed and prepare for Senate confirmation hearings. This timeframe also enables Senate committees to prepare for a high volume of nominees and to complete as much vetting work as possible prior to the start of the New Year. The time from January 1 until the inauguration is a frenzied period when confirmation hearings begin for the most senior nominees and the Senate itself is in the midst of a post-election reorganization.

The work of the appointments team continues well into the president’s first year in office, as the baton is passed to the Office of Presidential Personnel in the new administration. Fully staffing the president’s senior leadership team by the August recess (approximately 200 days into the presidency) is critical to ensuring the government can effectively carry out the president’s agenda and serve the American public.