Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

What Nobody Seems to Understand

President Trump has a Cabinet. The Cabinet is composed of agencies that are designed to assist the President and make policy recommendations on a range of activities too broad for one man to effectively manage. Examples of these agencies are Defense, Treasury, State, Education, Homeland Security and a host of others. The Organization of a Cabinet has its origin in what is commonly referred to as a "Staff" in the military. This is where the whole notion of having a Cabinet comes from. So to understand how a Cabinet is supposed to work one must understand how a Staff works because a civilian cabinet is essentially the same as a military Staff, the origin of which goes back to Frederick the Great and the German General Staff.

In war and in government a staff exists to accomplish two things. First is to determine "Best" and second to make sure the organization acts upon what is decided. For example the first part is no more than the problem solving process. In this process the problem is defined, facts and assumptions surrounding the problem are laid out, possible courses of action are formulated and the optimal course recommended to the decision maker, who is the General or in political parlance, The President. Now here is the part that nobody seems to understand.

It is not the staff that makes the decisions, it is the General or the President. The staff can only make recommendations. The ultimate decision maker is the General or the President (G/P). However, one of the great dangers of a staff manifests itself when they decide they are the ultimate deciding authority and not the G/P. This is what we see happening in today's politics. Often Cabinet staffers continue from one administration to the next. This should not be an issue unless the staff officer (bureaucrat) forgets who they are and decides that the decisions of the G/C are not to be supported when they differ from the position or view of the staff officer. When partisan politics come into play, the staff is no longer as concerned about "Best" as they are about maintaining power, continuing the policies of the old administration and/or preserving the status quo. For the unscrupulous holdovers it is OK to "Sandbag" the President or worse, try cutting him out of the decision loop altogether.

This is one of the major problems that President Trump is facing. Partisans from the old administration, still embedded in the bureaucracy are engaged in partisan warfare to sabotage the effectiveness of the newly elected regime, which brings with it changes in the points of view that they campaigned on. It is not practical to replace everyone in government with each change in administration and those that continue to serve are expected to professionally and faithfully serve the new administration regardless of their prior political affiliation. This was historically not much of a problem until the Democrats lost the 2016 election and set out to impeach President Trump.

However, this is not the whole problem. What is being forgotten is what I call "Concurrency" in the decision making process. In the Military there are three separate entities working through the process. Obviously the staff (Cabinet) is involved but so is the President. In his mind he is game planning the same process as his staff. By the time the staff is ready to make their recommendations the President has ideas of his own arrived at independently. This enables him to enter into informed dialogue and reconcile his thinking from the group-think of his formal advisors and experts. Most people understand intuitively that this is what is going on in the exchange between the two. What is not intuitive is the third appendage of the process. In the military, the commander often asks a trusted subordinate commander to work the problem independently of himself and his staff. In Government this translates to having a trusted advisor outside the box providing input to the decision making.

So when President Trump asks Rudy Juliani, his personal lawyer and trusted advisor, to approach the problem from a different angle, this dimension to the process comes into play. It has ample precedent in both the conduct of war and the exercise of government. As long as there have been leaders and staffs there have been trusted outside advisors. They are legitimate and integral to the process providing an invaluable source of wisdom and advice.