some ways hasn t worked. and that s something that john kelly presumably you would want to adjust. there are several positions that have not been subject to turnover or the security clearances. they just haven t been filled from the beginning. in your article you say the bucket director is doing double duty as the acting head of the consumer protection agency. the personnel director is also overseeing the offices of political affairs and public liaison. how does all this affect the presidency? look at the state department, you have three undersecretary positions, ten assistant secretary positions, no nominees named yet. that does affect an administration. first of all, you have a lot of you can t impose a president s will on a massive bureaucracy like the federal government unless he has people who are loyal to him in these positions. you can t have a coherent policy a lot of the times unless you have political appointments who are providing leadership, direction and vision to th
our relationships with allies and others. absolutely. what difference do you think pompeo would make at the state department essentially? tillerson focused so much on a management restructuring to the detriment of morale among kind of the date-to-date diplomats at the state department. do you think pompeo would reverse that? i think mike pompeo actually would take more seriously the institution, and the need to make use of the diplomats in the state department. he may push harder, actually get some ambassadorial positions filled and some assistant secretary positions filled. i think the extent to which rex tillerson hasn t decimated the state department and worked as part of some apparent desire to reform the state department, but has really i think hollowed out that department. i think pompeo would be different in has regard and frankly a positive development. interesting. talk a second about north korea. we heard one of the reporters in
point, tillerson is essentially dismantling the state department as it has existed in modern american history, and so you look at countries where the embassies in the country, there s not an ambassador, and so local authorities aren t going and using the resources at the embassy. we aren t building those relationships. we have nothing at the country level that goes back to you look at the state department just the assistant secretary positions that are open. it s an amazing thing where you don t have specialists right now in state department and permanent positions on issues like north korea and europe issues. a whole bunch of middle east slots. and so there s no advice being filtered up to the white house, but, of course, in the white house coming back to this, and it s not a joke. the quotes are serious. although they would make great t shirts. no you have a president who doesn t want the advice of
we have u.s. cybercommand. we were able to effectively with israel, we now know slow down the iran nuclear developments. i m not going to speak to that particular project. but it has been reported in the paper, what i would say is we should look at cyber as a tool. we have to be very careful, though, as we have seen that these tools can come back and bite us. but i would hope there is a lot of work going on in the administration and, andrea, one of my greatest concerns about this and all of the other issues in front of the president and the national security of our country is we don t have the team in place that we need to do this work to make sure that the president has at his disposal all of the tools in the toolbox including cyber. what wendy is referring to, people, scoambassadors are tell us, they don t know whom to speak to. we are so lab icking. two assistant secretary positions out of 24 filled and those are holdovers and one
with the trump white house are out in the open. sources tell cnn tillerson are a testy exchange with a white house aide in a meeting last night described as intense and uncomfortab uncomfortable. apparently, tillerson is not pleased with the pace of filling crucial staff at the department and wants control over who gets hired and admitted frustration in public. watch this. satisfied with the pace of the staffing? no, i d like it to go faster, thank you. let s talk it over with former obama state department spokesman and cnn military diplomatic analyst retired admiral john kirby. to be fair, there s tensions between the cab innocents and agencies for appointments, but it is urgent to get the positions filled. a lot are under secretary and assistant secretary positions. that s right. no, it seems important for the state department to be fully