Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., on Tuesday told President Trump’s pick for Navy secretary, Richard V. Spencer, that he may be hindered in his new position by the legacy of his Obama predecessor, whom he called one of the most unpopular secretaries in modern history.
Spencer testified before the Armed Services Committee and is being considered as the president’s nominee to fill the top Navy civilian post vacated by Ray Mabus.
“I think it is unfortunate that you’ve inherited this legacy and it’s going to make it somewhat hard when you start out to restore the credibility of the secretariat,” Cotton said during Spencer’s nomination hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Mabus, who was also a Democrat governor of Mississippi, was appointed by President Barack Obama and drew some fire for naming Navy ships after historical figures such as labor leader Cesar Chavez and gay rights icon Harvey Milk. He ended up with one of the longest Navy secretary tenures in the past century.
“Your predecessor displayed what I think is questionable and strange judgment on some matters that left him as one of the most unpopular service secretaries of the modern era,” Cotton said.
Cotton told the Senate hearing he would go through some of Mabus’ questionable decisions, unloading with a laundry list of conservative complaints during the secretary’s tenure.
“He politicized the naming of U.S. Navy ships; he made some very strange changes to the Navy uniform that caused a revolt among female sailors; he publicly dismissed officials reports about combat effectiveness of mixed gender units without even having read them by his own admission; he dumped the Navy’s rating titles, some of which … have been around for 200 years; he tried to power Navy fleets with unproven expensive and inadequate fuel alternatives based on current technology at some cases at the cost of $28 per gallon; and he questioned the character and integrity of Marines who dared to disagree with some of these policies,” Cotton said.
When asked for a reply, Spencer, a financier and former Marine aviator, told Cotton that he would not use the Navy as a “petri dish” for social experiments and would instead defer to his superiors in the Trump administration.
“I totally believe that policy should be developed at the [Defense Department] level and then discussed, socialized, and then deployed and then obeyed,” he said.
