When Defense Secretary James Mattis reports to work at his Pentagon office Monday, he will be surround by dozens of vacant offices with empty desks.
As the sole confirmed political appointee of the Trump administration in the sprawling building, he will be largely without his own team, which will be assembled in the next weeks and months.
The Pentagon will not grind to a halt however; the massive bureaucracy is teeming with thousands of military workers and career civil servants.
“All you have to do is look at [Joint Chiefs] Chairman [Joseph] Dunford and the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and our combatant commanders to see that there is certainly in uniform a depth of experience that will serve this country, will serve the next president and the next administration,” said Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook on his last day on the job.
Cook is one of about 200 political appointees who fill top positions in the Pentagon and provide civilian oversight to the military, but whose jobs ended with the Obama administration.
There are two categories of political appointees: top-level positions requiring Senate confirmation, and many more lower-level posts who can basically be created and filled at will.
But while Mattis’ is the only Pentagon position approved by the Senate, that does not mean there are no civilians at the helm.
Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work, the No. 2 civilian at the Pentagon, agreed to stay on until April to provide continuity, and his office issued a memo the day before Trump’s inauguration appointing place-holders to fill all the top positions until their replacements show up.
On Friday, just over an hour after his swearing-in, Trump signed the formal papers nominating Vincent Viola to be Army secretary, but the Navy and Air Force secretary nominees have not yet been named.
So all three services have acting secretaries for now, who are generally authorized to perform all duties of the office: Robert Speer for the Army, Sean Stackley for the Navy, and Lisa Disbrow for the Air Force.
A military officer, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, will fill in as chief spokesman for the department as acting assistant to the secretary of defense (public affairs).
All told, Trump has asked more than 50 senior Obama administration appointees to stay on in critical posts, says White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
Among the national security officials asked to stay are Brett McGurk, special envoy for the global coalition to counter ISIS; Nick Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Adam Szubin, acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence in the Treasury Department.
In 2008, the last time the presidency changed parties, President Obama’s picks for deputy defense secretary, William Lynn, and policy chief Michele Flournoy, weren’t confirmed until February.
Obama had one advantage. He convinced President Bush’s defense secretary, the highly-respected Robert Gates, to stick around and provide continuity for the novice president.
