There are quite a few Wall Street dealmakers who, several times a year, make the trek to Washington, where they find ways to inject their ideas into the public policy discourse. Steve Mnuchin is not one of them.
Donald J. Trump’s nominee to be the next Treasury secretary doesn’t serve on the boards of any policy-oriented institutions, and I could find no evidence he has ever appeared on a panel at the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, or any of the other places in Washington where people debate economic policy.
“I had never heard of him,†said Stan Veuger, an economic policy expert at A.E.I., which is something I’ve heard from many Washington policy people since Mr. Mnuchin emerged as a candidate to run the Treasury Department.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and speaking on panels at the Brookings Institution is neither a prerequisite for high government office nor a guarantee that a person will be any good at it. Mr. Mnuchin is, from the accounts of those who have worked with him, smart, capable and pragmatic.
But his appointment is part of a recurring theme as Mr. Trump has assembled his cabinet. Most of his appointments have precious little in the way of directly relevant policy experience. Mr. Trump, who has never worked in government at any level, has also named a chief of staff (Reince Priebus) and chief White House strategist (Steve Bannon) of whom the same can be said.
In a more normal administration, a person like Mr. Mnuchin would be lined up for a cushy ambassadorship in a pleasant city like Paris or London instead of serving as the nation’s chief economic statesman.
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There are exceptions to this, with nominations of conventionally qualified candidates like Representative Tom Price to head Health and Human Services and former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to run the Transportation Department.
But with his appointments so far â€" to the list add the commerce secretary nominee Wilbur Ross and the education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos â€" Mr. Trump seems to be betting that nuts-and-bolts experience running government agencies and wrestling with the hard technical details of public policy just don’t matter.
Certainly outsiders can shake up a sclerotic bureaucracy and bring fresh perspective. Whatever you think of Mr. Ross’s views on trade, they are strongly held and informed by years of involvement with global business, and will surely steer the Commerce Department in a new direction.
But usually you expect an appointee in that outsider mold to then appoint a deputy who “knows the building,†or has a clear understanding of how to exercise the levers of power in the aforementioned sclerotic bureaucracy. Which paper do you need to push in which direction to get your policy enacted? What are the likely downsides of those policies, and how can they be minimized?
With Commerce, the Trump team is going the other direction, nominating Todd Ricketts to be deputy secretary of Commerce. Mr. Ricketts’s family owns the Chicago Cubs baseball team; the Trump transition’s news release announcing the appointment cites the Ricketts’ success in building the Cubs into a World Series winner.
Public policy is really complicated. If this hiring pattern continues, more unconventional appointees may struggle, especially early on, to get up to speed on things like which assistant secretary handles what and the laborious process of developing regulations.
More broadly, it’s now clearer what Mr. Trump meant by his “drain the swamp†promises during the campaign. Corporate interests are loving most of what they hear from the incoming administration. Corporate taxes are likely to be cut and regulations loosened. These are shaping up to be boom times for lobbyists.
The swamp that is being drained is the one inhabited by wonkish technocrats who have devoted their careers to the details of policy-making. If nothing else, the years ahead will be a fascinating experiment in how much policy expertise actually matters to effective governing.
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