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Trump Could Get Help on the Economy, but He’s Choosing Not To

In a period of economic instability, a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers could be a helpful aide.

Kevin Hassett, who departed as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in June, presented to President Trump at the White House in January.Credit...Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Mr. Bernstein, a political scientist, is a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion.

One of the more telling mistakes that Donald Trump is making is he’s entering into a period of potential economic instability with a vacancy in a position that could help him. The last chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Kevin Hassett, told the president in late May that he was leaving; Trump announced it on June 2; Hassett’s last day was June 28. Since then, Tomas Philipson has been the acting chairman. So it’s been almost three months since Trump learned of Hassett’s departure, and he has yet to nominate a replacement.

(In typical Trump fashion, he claimed on June 2 that he would announce a new chairman “as soon as I get back to the U.S.” from the overseas trip he was on at the time. Normal presidents try to avoid making specious promises because they care about their reputation for honesty and for following through on their plans — but not Trump.)

The Council of Economic Advisers vacancy isn’t the most significant of the 145 openings in important positions without nominees; that would probably be secretary of homeland security (Kirstjen Nielsen resigned on April 7 and her last day was April 10, so that’s over four months without a nominee for that one). But it’s an interesting one because of what it says about Trump’s approach to the presidency. For that, it’s worth going into a bit of explanation.

When the government expanded in the 1930s and 1940s, Franklin Roosevelt and then Harry Truman discovered that they were at a disadvantage in managing the newly enlarged executive branch. More agencies, and more responsibilities for those agencies, meant it was harder for presidents to affect what was happening. In part that’s because executive branch departments and agencies are as much creatures of Congress as they are of the president; Congress gives them statutory authority and sets their budgets, and the Senate confirms the president’s nominees. In part it’s because large agencies wind up with large bureaucracies that resist any kind of outside control.

To fight this, Truman set up what became practically a new branch of the government — what the political scientist John Hart called the “presidential branch” — consisting of the White House staff and various agencies, including the National Security Council and the Office of Management and Budget, all within the Executive Office of the President. In part, that was set up to help the president coordinate the government and to give overall assistance to the president. But it also offers the president independent sources of information.

As the presidency scholar Richard Neustadt observed, for effective presidenting, information is intensely important. If being president is about bargaining with others, then knowing more than they do about policy and politics is what can give the president a decisive advantage.

But it’s complicated. Presidents must deal with all types of information, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Executive branch agencies have practical experience with their jobs — but what they know may be biased in favor of the bureaucracy’s operating procedures. Partisans may have deep knowledge of how party coalition groups will react to a public policy and how it will affect them, but their advocacy may lead to one-sided analysis.

So presidents have also sought to get “neutral” information — expertise outside of the push and pull of either party politics or the politics of implementation. Thus the Council of Economic Advisers, a Truman-era (1946) innovation that puts typically academic economists inside the presidential branch. Neutral, scientific information also has its weaknesses. It may be ignorant of critically important political implications, and any academic discipline winds up with idiosyncratic preferences that may be difficult for outsiders to decipher.

Nevertheless, wise presidents recognize the limitations of different forms of information and use their position in the political system to outflank others by gathering more and more ways of seeing important policy questions — including scientific and academic forms of “neutral” information. Economists may be wrong about, say, the effects of tariffs, but only a very foolish president wouldn’t want to at least know what those economists know.

Trump has supposedly relied on “acting” people in different agencies because he thinks that gives him more influence over them. That’s wrong, because those “actings” may kowtow to the president, but without any clout within their agencies, it doesn’t actually do Trump any good. But the Council of Economic Advisers is different: The whole point of having one is to get “neutral” analysis, which the president can then take or leave as he or she sees fit. Using an acting chairman will no doubt make that person less secure in the job and less likely to be forthright, but there’s really no upside to that at all.

Of course, this is a president whose main source of information appears to be whoever Fox News happens to put on the air, who doesn’t seem to accept that there is such a thing as neutral information and who considers anything that resembles bad news to be a likely sign of a conspiracy against him. And yet he seems oddly unaware that advisers with strong policy preferences may flatter him to his face while putting their own advocacy ahead of his political needs.

This results in an economic team uniquely ill suited to combat bad economic times. Which is both a danger to his presidency — something he seems to understand — and to the nation.

Politics Around the Web

1. Matt Grossmann in The Times on the policy consequences of Republican success in state government.

2. Alla Baranovsky-Dewey at the Monkey Cage on the Russia garbage protests.

3. Emma Green of The Atlantic talks with Ben Howe about evangelicals and Trump.

4. At Bloomberg Opinion, Tobin Harshaw on the geopolitical implications of the fight over giant clamshells.

5. Susan B. Glasser at The New Yorker on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

6. Greg Sargent on trouble for Trump’s economic plan.

7. And Dan Drezner has a modest proposal involving Canada. And $20 trillion in “cold, hard cash.” And I’m pretty sure he only wrote the thing because of the punch line at the end, but it’s fun anyway.

This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. David is on a break until Labor Day. While he’s away, two outside writers are taking his place. This week’s author is Jonathan Bernstein (@jbview), a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion. You can subscribe to Jonathan’s regular newsletter, and you can sign up here to receive David’s newsletter each weekday.

If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

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