Noah Feldman, Columnist

4,000 Reasons to Think Trump's Power Will Be Restrained

The vast number of political appointments means the likely return of Bush administration veterans.

November 14, 2016 at 5:26 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Obama employees, soon to be out of work.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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Four thousand: That’s the number of political appointees President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team will have to pick in the next few months for the government to continue running effectively after President Barack Obama leaves office. The challenge is great for any new administration; it’s especially daunting for a political outsider whose staff, according to the Wall Street Journal, was surprised to hear last week that it would have to replace everyone in the West Wing.

Political appointees are supposed to make the president more powerful. But for Trump, the appointees might have the opposite effect. The Trump team doesn’t have anything like 4,000 qualified loyalists ready to walk into executive branch jobs, the way most presidential campaigns do. To get Republican candidates with relevant executive branch experience, it will have to choose former Bush administration officials. For better or worse, Trump’s presidential agenda is therefore likely to be filtered through mainstream Republican personnel.