Patrick Shanahan’s Endless Limbo
Late Monday night, the Defense Department announced that it was directing $1 billion to help fund a border fence. Tuesday morning, the House Armed Services Committee chairman, Adam Smith, made public a letter saying that his committee would deny the request—right in the middle of Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan’s own testimony to that very committee.
It’s not clear that Congress can actually prevent this, but the exchange highlighted the awkward spot Shanahan now finds himself in. He’s now the longest-serving acting defense secretary, and has to justify the policies of a mercurial president to a skeptical Congress while under an ethics investigation from his own department. Shanahan spent his career at Boeing, as a problem-solving executive with an engineer’s appreciation of detail. He had never served in public life before becoming the deputy secretary of defense under James Mattis.
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