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President Trump Misses 90-Day Deadline To Appoint a Cybersecurity Team After Alleged Russian Hacking (politico.com)
From a report: President-elect Donald Trump was very clear: "I will appoint a team to give me a plan within 90 days of taking office," he said in January, after getting a U.S. intelligence assessment of Russian interference in last year's elections and promising to address cybersecurity. Thursday, Trump hits his 90-day mark. There is no team, there is no plan, and there is no clear answer from the White House on who would even be working on what. It's the latest deadline Trump's set and missed -- from the press conference he said his wife would hold last fall to answer questions about her original immigration process to the plan to defeat ISIS that he'd said would come within his first 30 days in office. Since his inauguration, Trump's issued a few tweets and promises to get to the bottom of Russian hacking -- and accusations of surveillance of Americans, himself included, by the Obama administration.
More like news for people who aren't paying attention.
The administration is way behind on filling much more important positions than this. Last month suddenly reversed themselves on the US attorneys staying on until there are replacements... fine, but as of today there aren't any nominees for any of the 93 prosecutor positions, because they haven't filled the undersecretary level positions that do that. Justice is also missing a number of key appointees for national security positions.
There's the same story at state, where over half of the high level appointees have yet to be named, including officials to oversee the Middle East or nuclear anti-proliferation.
The confusing situation with the USS Vinson might well have something to do with the fact that a number of important second and third tier DoD positions haven't been filled, and the same at the Executive Office of the President. A lot of what those people a teir or two below the top do is make sure the right hand knows what the left is doing.
Cybersecurity is an important issue, but the administration doesn't have the people in place to set up and run such a team yet.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Donald Trump, unfortunately, satisfies a common desire among the populance to right things by means that won't actually right them. It's a desire to rid Washington of inaction by cleaning it out of the current folks who don't seem to get anything done: and then you find that the things they were working on are harder than you understood. It's the feeling that you can get things going right by having a manager who lights a fire under the responsible people: just the way that bank managers pressured employees to increase revenue or be fired until those employees started opening accounts fraudulently for customers who hadn't asked for them.
What I am having a hard time with is how our country gets back out of this. I fear Humpty has had such a great fall that there is no peaceful recovery.
Bruce Perens.