Bringing President Donald Trump’s notion of government as corporate enterprise to fruition, the White House on Monday announced that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner will be leading a sweeping government overhaul, leaning on business leaders to solve pressing national issues while looking to privatize key government functions.
Trump and Kushner confirmed the move to the Washington Post, which described the new White House Office of American Innovation as a “SWAT team” of professionals with “little-to-no political experience” that will “help find efficiencies” within the federal government, while also reaching out to the private sector to determine what functions could be privately outsourced.
“We should have excellence in government,” Kusher told the Post. “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens.”
The news that Kushner, the real estate heir married to Ivanka Trump, would be leading this enterprise prompted accusations of nepotism and kleptocracy. As many pointed out, Kushner has continued to amass power within the Trump administration, despite the fact that he has never held elected office nor has he been reviewed by the Senate for potential ethics violations.
In a column titled, “Donald Trump plans to make Jared Kushner America’s unelected, unapproved, uncontrolled CEO,” Daily Kos columnist and author Mark Sumner observed that while Trump “is anxious to destroy existing offices and departments, he’s creating a brand new one, to be led by his 36-year-old son-in-law, a man who has never held elected office, never stood for Senate review, and who isn’t screened out by nepotism laws because…no one knows why.”
The Post also notes that the new position
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