Ex-CIA chief resigns from Trump's transition team - NBC News

Ex-CIA Director James Woolsey Quits Trump Transition Team

Former CIA director James Woolsey has left the Donald Trump presidential transition team, a spokesman for the former defense official and ambassador said. 

"Effective immediately, Ambassador Woolsey is no longer a senior advisor to President-elect Trump or the Transition. He wishes the president-elect and his administration great success in their time in office," Woolsey spokesman Jonathan Franks said in a statement on his behalf. 

Woolsey, who was CIA director under President Bill Clinton, had served as a senior adviser to Trump on national security and intelligence.

Woolsey said in an interview on CNN Thursday night that he put out the statement to clear up a possible misconception that he was more heavily involved in the transition process, or that he was still giving advice to the president-elect. 

Related: Clapper Takes Swipe at Trump, Assange as He Defends Russia Hack Intel

A person close to Woolsey said the former CIA chief "didn't want to have his name out there as a 'senior adviser' when he wasn't giving advice," citing the strong influence on Trump of incoming National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn. 

The resignation comes as Trump has been in a war of words with U.S. intelligence agencies over assessments that the Russian government was likely involved in a covert campaign to attempt to interfere in the U.S. election. 

A source close to Woolsey told NBC News the former CIA chief felt increasingly uncomfortable with the Trump transition's decision-making on matters of intelligence, particularly amid a report the incoming administration is considering restructuring certain intelligence agencies. But that report has been batted down as "100 percent false" by a transition spokesman. 

Related: Russians Celebrated When Trump Won Election, Intel Report Says: Source

On PBS' "NewsHour" Wednesday, Woolsey didn't agree with a question that suggested Trump was showing "disregard" to U.S. intelligence officials, but said "it certainly is raising issues. There's no doubt about is that." 

"Donald Trump does that in his own way. He raised issues in a way that turned out to be very successful for him politically, got him elected president of the United States, when virtually everybody that he talked to said you can't raise issues that way," Woolsey said on the program. 

"So I think we all need to take half a step back and look at the fact that he handles things like this differently than a lot of other people," he said. 

Related: Trump Jabs 'Intelligence' Officials for Allegedly Delaying 'Russian Hacking' Briefing

In an interview with CNN also on Wednesday, Woolsey made comments about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose website posted stolen emails purportedly from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's account, that were different in tone from Trump. 

While Trump on Wednesday cited an Assange interview casting doubt on Russia being a source of the leaks, Woolsey said on CNN: "I don't think there's any point in listening to Julian Assange. He's quite a ne'er-do-well."

NBC News

The Real Reason the French Work Less Than Americans Do - TIME Business

The Real Reason the French Work Less Than Americans Do

Posted: 03 Jan 2017 01:00 PM PST

When the French government instituted a policy that will allow employees to disconnect from work email while they’re not in the office, effective at the start of 2017, many American workers may have looked across the ocean with jealousy.
Though the new French law doesn’t set any hard-and-fast rules, it’s designed to help workers limit the amount of time that work email infringes upon leisure time. It’s just one example of the many labor laws and norms—from regulations that control actual hours worked to policies about paid parental leave—that tend to leave European workers with a more even work-life balance than their U.S. counterparts experience.

For instance, in 2015, the French worked an average of 1,482 hours a year, while American workers worked about 1,790 hours, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Meanwhile, U.S. workers—who receive about 15 days off per year—also get less vacation time than their European counterparts, who get about 30, according to a 2015 survey from Expedia.com. What’s more, while American employees take about 73% of their allotted vacation time, German and French workers take nearly all of the vacation time they’re allowed.
But how did the worker experience in these two regions get so different in the first place?
Some have argued that European culture is generally more inclined toward a leisurely pace than American culture is. However, the cause of that laid-back French workplace culture is about more than just some vague notion that relaxing is good. As TIME has previously reported, Americans used to believe that their own time spent at the office would decrease over time:

Factory output per worker jumped more than 40% from 1919 to 1925, and even the Great Depression would be only a blip in the broader trend. World War II’s wage-controlled labor market compelled employers to offer better benefits to recruit workers. By 1961, a FORTUNE story heralded “The Expanding Vacation”; the piece suggested that organized labor had become sufficiently content with wages to a point where union leaders instead sought ways for workers to enjoy those wages. The United Auto Workers even founded a program whereby it would charter flights to Europe, Hawaii and Mexico for workers. A 1968 law moved several date-fixed federal holidays to Mondays, creating the modern three-day weekend.
But by the 1970s, the steady decline in the average length of the American workweek reversed itself. The decade brought a rise in consumerism that coincided with a slowdown in economic growth, forcing Americans to work more hours just to maintain an ill-considered standard of living, argued sociologist Juliet Schor in her 1992 book The Overworked American. We had volunteered to exhaust ourselves.

Meanwhile, until the 1970s, French employees worked more hours than Americans did.
The reversal can be traced to union and collective-bargaining contracts, says Bruce Sacerdote, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College who has studied workplace trends in the U.S. and in European countries. As unemployment rose in France in the 1970s, French unions responded to the economic trouble in a way that was very different from the response to slowing growth in the U.S.: they advocated a policy of work sharing, in which individual workers’ hours would be reduced in response to the increasing number of people without jobs. Using catchphrases like “work less, work all,” they argued that society would benefit if the same amount of work could be done by a greater number of workers, with each working less.
These attractive policies caused the unions to become stronger and represent more workers. Eventually, they secured valuable time off — which, by the time the economic downturn had passed, had become the status quo in France. Once workers were given several weeks off in August, for instance, they understandably didn’t want to later give up that prized vacation time.
That situation also led to what Sacerdote called a “coordination benefit.” France, for example, has 25 federally-mandated vacation days, allowing most employees in the country to be off at the same time. That way, productivity doesn’t suffer in the same way that it would if people staggered their vacation days.

“It led to a general feeling that this was a good thing, that they wanted to be off at the same time,” Sacerdote said, comparing that plan to the informal break that tends to occur between the Christmas holidays and New Year’s Day in the U.S.

And experts say that coordination is not the only benefit of the French method. Though the U.S. is more productive than France in terms of output per worker and income per capita, France’s policies are not making the country lazy. Instead, taking a liberal amount of time off—and fully disconnecting when they do so—tends to make people more productive during the hours they’re actually on the clock, Sacerdote said.
“Almost as much productivity can happen, but within a defined set of hours,” Sacerdote said. “It’s setting an expectation; people don’t feel like they have to be checking email.”

Why is Trump sweet on Russia but rough on China - CNN

Why is Trump soft with Russia but tough with China ?
Washington (CNN)President-elect Donald Trump has been playing global favorites on Twitter.
He has showered praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling him "very smart!," and dismissed charges that Moscow tried to hack the election process -- even as he's bashed China for currency manipulation, skewing trade and failing to rein in North Korea.
It's unusual enough for a president-elect to try to sway foreign policy before he's in office, let alone in 140-character bursts. While Trump aides have said some of his statements shouldn't be taken "literally," the tweets offer insight to his foreign policy views and raise a question: When both China and Russia are challenging US power globally, why is he so sweet on Moscow and so sour on Beijing?
Trump's positions on Russia and China mark a sharp turn from current policies -- and that might to the point. Trump and much of the Republican establishment have made clear they aim to dismantle parts of President Barack Obama's legacy. Trump is also looking to use international relations in pursuit of economic ends, even as some observers worry his approach is based on misperceptions of economic forces.
Some analysts point to the possibility that Trump is taking a deeply strategic approach; others say he simply fails to understand the crucial importance of long-standing US alliances. At the least, it is an approach that contrasts with Obama, who has tried to find areas of common interest with China to bridge serious divides. At the same time, he has endeavored, with little success, to isolate Russia for a series of international violations.
"It's a sign of confusion if you're making trouble with the Chinese at the same time as you're making trouble with US allies in Asia, and it's a sign of confusion if you're trying to make up with Russia at the same that you're not tending to American alliances in Europe," said Steven Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Trump "acts like a guy who thinks he can make everybody mad at the same time and not pay a price for it," Sestanovich said.
Russia has conducted a stealth invasion of Ukraine, annexed Crimea -- the first attempt to alter European borders by force since World War II -- and is believed to have supplied the missile that brought down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, shot down over Ukraine in 2014.
Moscow has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country's civil war, including in the bombing of civilians in Aleppo, in direct opposition to the US. The Russian military has buzzed US aircraft and ships. And the US intelligence community found with "high confidence" that Russia was behind hacking during the presidential election campaign meant to sow doubts about American democracy.
And yet Trump speaks warmly of Putin and his desire for better cooperation with Russia, publicly dismissing the hacking allegations and accusing the intelligence community of acting politically.
That stand has damaged morale within the intelligence community and puzzled observers who wonder whether it's a strategic decision or a function of Trump's admiration for authoritarian figures, possible business deals with Russian oligarchs, or as-yet-undiscovered links or financial debts. Russian officials have said they were in contact with the Trump campaign throughout the election.
RELATED: Trump attacks set intelligence community on edge
Matt Rojansky, head of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, said one reason could be Trump's belief that the US should do more work with Russia to defeat terrorism and his view of that challenge as a "civilizational battle between radical Islam and, broadly speaking, the forces of Western civilization."
Trump and his aides, particularly his future national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, are much more comfortable including Russia under the "Western civilization" umbrella than prominent Republicans such as Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rojansky said. That will cause friction, possibly sooner rather than later.
McCain will hold hearings Thursday to examine Russia's role in the election hacking. The Arizona senator and Graham have announced that they will also lead new sanctions against Russia. McCain already is working on legislation with the leading Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin.
If Trump's stance on Russia might fray some of his alliances in Congress, he's already put European allies on edge with his warmth toward Putin and questions about the worth of NATO. He's also unnerved Asian allies by questioning the cost of helping Japan and South Korea defend themselves.
"I can see why it's a temptation for a big shot like Trump to think that smaller powers don't matter and you just solve your problems with the other big guys," said Sestanovich, who is also a professor at Columbia University. "That's just a mistake. The other guys are going to eat your lunch if you have let American alliance ties wither. I think that's what he doesn't get."
He said that, "The biggest lever we have with the Chinese is our network of alliances, similarly with the Russians."



* JUST WATCHEDTrump slams N. Korea, China in tweets
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Trump slams N. Korea, China in tweets 01:44
"It's a sign of confusion if you're making trouble with the Chinese at the same time as you're making trouble with US allies in Asia, and it's a sign of confusion if you're trying to make up with Russia at the same that you're not tending to American alliances in Europe," said Steven Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Trump "acts like a guy who thinks he can make everybody mad at the same time and not pay a price for it," Sestanovich said.
Russia has conducted a stealth invasion of Ukraine, annexed Crimea -- the first attempt to alter European borders by force since World War II -- and is believed to have supplied the missile that brought down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, shot down over Ukraine in 2014.
Moscow has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country's civil war, including in the bombing of civilians in Aleppo, in direct opposition to the US. The Russian military has buzzed US aircraft and ships. And the US intelligence community found with "high confidence" that Russia was behind hacking during the presidential election campaign meant to sow doubts about American democracy.
And yet Trump speaks warmly of Putin and his desire for better cooperation with Russia, publicly dismissing the hacking allegations and accusing the intelligence community of acting politically.
That stand has damaged morale within the intelligence community and puzzled observers who wonder whether it's a strategic decision or a function of Trump's admiration for authoritarian figures, possible business deals with Russian oligarchs, or as-yet-undiscovered links or financial debts. Russian officials have said they were in contact with the Trump campaign throughout the election.
RELATED: Trump attacks set intelligence community on edge
Matt Rojansky, head of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, said one reason could be Trump's belief that the US should do more work with Russia to defeat terrorism and his view of that challenge as a "civilizational battle between radical Islam and, broadly speaking, the forces of Western civilization."
Trump and his aides, particularly his future national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, are much more comfortable including Russia under the "Western civilization" umbrella than prominent Republicans such as Arizona Sen. John McCain and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, Rojansky said. That will cause friction, possibly sooner rather than later.
McCain will hold hearings Thursday to examine Russia's role in the election hacking. The Arizona senator and Graham have announced that they will also lead new sanctions against Russia. McCain already is working on legislation with the leading Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin.
If Trump's stance on Russia might fray some of his alliances in Congress, he's already put European allies on edge with his warmth toward Putin and questions about the worth of NATO. He's also unnerved Asian allies by questioning the cost of helping Japan and South Korea defend themselves.
"I can see why it's a temptation for a big shot like Trump to think that smaller powers don't matter and you just solve your problems with the other big guys," said Sestanovich, who is also a professor at Columbia University. "That's just a mistake. The other guys are going to eat your lunch if you have let American alliance ties wither. I think that's what he doesn't get."
He said that, "The biggest lever we have with the Chinese is our network of alliances, similarly with the Russians."



* JUST WATCHEDTrump mocks intel agencies on Russian hack
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Trump mocks intel agencies on Russian hack 02:08
Some analysts have suggested Trump is practicing a sophisticated version of the "triangular diplomacy" former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon used to play the Soviet Union and China off against each other in the 1970s.
But the two nations are no longer bitter enemies and instead have a well-defined, if mutually wary, relationship.
"There's no way by improving relations with Russia you get a significant bang for your buck with the Chinese," Sestanovich said.
China, like Russia, has targeted the US with cyberattacks. Beijing has pushed US companies in China to give up proprietary technology, it has contested US claims to freedom of navigation through Asian waters, its military has buzzed US naval vessels and Air Force jets, and it recently stole a US underwater drone.
If Trump seems to look the other way on Russian transgressions, China gets no free pass.
The President-elect, who manufactures parts of his clothing line in China, often charges that Beijing steals American jobs with unfair trade practices. "China has been taking out massive amounts of money & wealth from the U.S. in totally one-sided trade, but won't help with North Korea. Nice!" he tweeted Monday. Soon after winning the presidency, he antagonized Beijing by holding a phone conversation with Taiwan's leader.
Trump has long made China a bogeyman, accusing it in a 2012 tweet of having "created" the concept of global warming in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. He has particularly fixated on China's economic practices, blasting it on trade and currency throughout the presidential race and blaming it for the loss of American jobs. Trade and job losses were central rallying cries of his campaign.
RELATED: Donald Trump's fight with America's spies
Richard Bush, director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, said Trump's criticisms reflect a lack of understanding about international economics. "The jobs China is accused of stealing, many were lost a long time ago to Korea or Japan and moved from there to China," he said. "A lot of that job loss occurred because of technology change," he said.
And despite Trump's promises to bring jobs back to the US, Bush said, "Nobody in the US would do them at the wages companies would want to charge. Those jobs are never going to be gotten back."
Bush also pointed out that there are limits to how much any US president can change relations with China. "Will the American business community sit idly by and watch Trump undertake a trade war with China? They have a lot at stake in this," he said.
In the meantime, Trump's stream of anti-Chinese Tweets poses risks, he said.
While Trump might be trying to create bargaining positions or exert pressure, his tweets might be misunderstood, Bush said, creating the chance that "China would regard a potential challenge as more dangerous than it actually might be."

Brexit chief Ivan Rogers' letter to his staff after his resignation - Financial Times

Text of Sir Ivan Rogers’ letter to staff

Dear All,
Happy New Year! I hope that you have all had/are still having, a great break, and that you will come back refreshed and ready for an exciting year ahead.
I am writing to you all on the first day back to tell you that I am today resigning as Permanent Representative.
As most of you will know, I started here in November 2013. My four-year tour is therefore due to end in October – although in practice if we had been doing the Presidency my time here would have been extended by a few months.
As we look ahead to the likely timetable for the next few years, and with the invocation of Article 50 coming up shortly, it is obvious that it will be best if the top team in situ at the time that Article 50 is invoked remains there till the end of the process and can also see through the negotiations for any new deal between the UK and the EU27.
It would obviously make no sense for my role to change hands later this year.
I have therefore decided to step down now, having done everything that I could in the last 6 months to contribute my experience, expertise and address book to get the new team at political and official level under way. This will permit a new appointee to be in place by the time Article 50 is invoked.
Importantly, it will also enable that person to play a role in the appointment of Shan’s replacement as DPR. I know from experience – both my own hugely positive experience of working in partnership with Shan, and from seeing past, less happy, examples – how imperative it is that the PR and DPR operate as a team, if UKREP is to function as well as I believe it has done over the last few years.
I want to put on record how grateful I am to Shan for the great working relationship we have had. She will be hugely missed in UKREP, and by many others here in Brussels, but she will be a tremendous asset to the Welsh Government.
From my soundings before Christmas, I am optimistic that there will be a very good field of candidates for the DPR role. But it is right these two roles now get considered and filled alongside each other, and for my successor to play the leading role in making the DPR appointment. I shall therefore stand aside from the process at this point.
I know that this news will add, temporarily, to the uncertainty that I know, from our many discussions in the autumn, you are all feeling about the role of UKREP in the coming months and years of negotiations over “Brexit.” I am sorry about that, but I hope that it will help produce earlier and greater clarity on the role that UKREP should play.
My own view remains as it has always been. We do not yet know what the Government will set as negotiating objectives for the UK’s relationship with the EU after exit. There is much we will not know until later this year about the political shape of the EU itself, and who the political protagonists in any negotiation with the UK will be.
But in any negotiation which addresses the new relationship, the technical expertise, the detailed knowledge of positions on the other side of the table – and the reasons for them, and the divisions amongst them – and the negotiating experience and savvy that the people in this building bring, make it essential for all parts of UKREP to be centrally involved in the negotiations if the UK is to achieve the best possible outcomes.
Serious multilateral negotiating experience is in short supply in Whitehall, and that is not the case in the Commission or in the Council. The Government will only achieve the best for the country if it harnesses the best experience we have – a large proportion of which is concentrated in UKREP – and negotiates resolutely. Senior Ministers, who will decide on our positions, issue by issue, also need from you detailed, unvarnished – even where this is uncomfortable — and nuanced understanding of the views, interests and incentives of the other 27.
The structure of the UK’s negotiating team and the allocation of roles and responsibilities to support that team, needs rapid resolution. The working methods which enable the team in London and Brussels to function seamlessly need also to be strengthened.
The great strength of the UK system – at least as it has been perceived by all others in the EU – has always been its unique combination of policy depth, expertise and coherence, message co-ordination and discipline, and the ability to negotiate with skill and determination. UKREP has always been key to all of that. We shall need it more than ever in the years ahead.
As I have argued consistently at every level since June, many opportunities for the UK in the future will derive from the mere fact of having left and being free to take a different path. But others will depend entirely on the precise shape of deals we can negotiate in the years ahead. Contrary to the beliefs of some, free trade does not just happen when it is not thwarted by authorities: increasing market access to other markets and consumer choice in our own, depends on the deals, multilateral, plurilateral and bilateral that we strike, and the terms that we agree. I shall advise my successor to continue to make these points.
Meanwhile, I would urge you all to stick with it, to keep on working at intensifying your links with opposite numbers in DEXEU and line Ministries and to keep on contributing your expertise to the policy-making process as negotiating objectives get drawn up. The famed UKREP combination of immense creativity with realism ground in negotiating experience, is needed more than ever right now.
On a personal level, leaving UKREP will be a tremendous wrench. I have had the great good fortune, and the immense privilege, in my civil service career, to have held some really interesting and challenging roles: to have served 4 successive UK Prime Ministers very closely; to have been EU, G20 and G8 Sherpa; to have chaired a G8 Presidency and to have taken part in some of the most fraught, and fascinating, EU negotiations of the last 25 years – in areas from tax, to the MFF to the renegotiation.
Of all of these posts, I have enjoyed being the Permanent Representative more than any other I have ever held. That is, overwhelmingly, because of all of you and what you all make UKREP: a supremely professional place, with a fantastic co-operative culture, which brings together talented people whether locally employed or UK-based and uniquely brings together people from the home civil service with those from the Foreign Office. UKREP sets itself demanding standards, but people also take the time to support each other which also helps make it an amazingly fun and stimulating place to work. I am grateful for everything you have all done over the last few years to make this such a fantastic operation.
For my part, I hope that in my day-to-day dealings with you I have demonstrated the values which I have always espoused as a public servant. I hope you will continue to challenge ill-founded arguments and muddled thinking and that you will never be afraid to speak the truth to those in power. I hope that you will support each other in those difficult moments where you have to deliver messages that are disagreeable to those who need to hear them. I hope that you will continue to be interested in the views of others, even where you disagree with them, and in understanding why others act and think in the way that they do. I hope that you will always provide the best advice and counsel you can to the politicians that our people have elected, and be proud of the essential role we play in the service of a great democracy.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017. All rights reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.
Financial Times

The challenges to globalisation in 2017 - Financial Times

Like cats in popular folk wisdom, globalisation appears to have many lives. The integration of markets in goods, services and capital that accelerated in the 1990s with the fall of communism and the rise of China has been written off many times, notably during the global financial crisis. Yet it has survived.
This past year, its obituarists have had more material to work with than usual. The stalling of a number of high-profile trade deals has had the pre-emptive mourners out in force arguing that the engine of liberalisation has failed. Feeble growth in worldwide goods trade relative to the expansion of the global economy has raised fears that protectionism has taken its toll. And the election of Donald Trump, with his tirades against Chinese imports stealing jobs, and the appointment ofChina trade hawks like Peter Navarroto his administration, suggests that the era of liberalised trade is over.
Of these worries, only the last is convincing. Even allowing for the fact that rhetoric on the US presidential campaign trail tends to be far more blood-curdling than subsequent actions when in office, Mr Trump’s zero-sum worldview is deeply troubling.
A number of large trade pacts — usually dubbed “free-trade agreements” whether or not they succeed in liberalising commerce — have failed in recent years. But 2016 was notable for two particularly large ones hitting the buffers — the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), involving the US and EU, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) of 12 Asia-Pacific economies. Moreover, the trade world was treated to some comic relief late in the year when the smaller pact between the EU and Canada was held up for a while by obstreperous Walloons, the government of Belgium’s francophone region objecting to various provisions therein.
That said, none of this was wildly surprising. TTIP, predictably for a large multi-stranded deal between two trading blocs used to acting as hegemons, has struggled since its launch. The TPP was opposed by both presidential candidates, even though Hillary Clinton had been intimately involved in its negotiation. It was always going to face an uphill passage through Congress. Under the radar, however, the EU moved closer to a deal with Japan, two of the world’s largest trading powers quietly getting on with business.

The art & science of economics at Cambridge - Economist

IN 1924 John Maynard Keynes, who invented macroeconomics, used a biographical essay about his mentor Alfred Marshall to muse on the qualities of a good economist.
He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought…No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.
Such paragons were hard to come by, Keynes sighed: “Good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds.” But there can have been no doubt in his mind that the likeliest place to find them roosting was among the sandstone crenellations of Cambridge colleges. The Cambridge economics department, founded by Marshall and home to Keynes, was at that time the world’s leading school of economics. It not only taught bright young people from around the empire. It also made them into what its faculty thought economists should be: technically accomplished purveyors of policy advice, dispassionate but engaged.
The goal can be seen in the exam questions of the time. Students were expected to combine economic principles with a strong grasp of current affairs. In 1927, for example, one paper on public finance asked students to explain the size and reasons for the main areas of British government spending. They were expected to have the skills of an essayist, spending one three-hour exam on a single question such as the future of gold, the rights and duties of shareholders, or alternatives to democracy. Cambridge economics considered itself to be an analytical science but calculation was not of the essence. A module in statistics produced a page-long test for final-year students; all the other papers were bare of mathematical symbols.
Compare this with the exams of today. Charlotte Grace, a student in the third year of the economics tripos (as undergraduate degrees are known in Cambridge), says she could have passed all the questions she faced in her first year without reading a newspaper. And though the five-page final-year macroeconomics exam that was set in 2015 asked about some contemporary policy conundrums, like which features of the euro zone may have contributed to its sovereign debt crisis, most of the paper sought to test students’ knowledge of tricky, algebra-heavy models. Three-hour pontifications on a single topic have been ditched in favour of a compulsory dissertation in which original empirical analysis is encouraged.
These tests reflect changes in the discipline. Students must master the technical apparatus of a highly specialised field. The maths they need to know and apply is sufficiently taxing as to barely leave time for history. Evidence-based conclusions are preferred to arms-length analysis; economists should know the limits of their expertise, and shy away from political judgments as they think through the effects of whatever policy tweaks providence might throw at them.
The mathematical precision and rigour is appealing to some. On a bright day in October, the first day of lectures this academic year, Angus Groom, a fresh-faced 18-year-old, comments that his first lecture, on macroeconomics, was “the kind of stuff I’ve read about before, but really coming at it from a rigorous perspective.” He is grateful to get beyond the wishy-washy stuff he studied at school.
The structured discipline Mr Groom is studying is a long way from the messy stew Mr Marshall faced when he first conceived of the economics tripos. When he was appointed to the university’s chair of political economy in 1885 economics was nestled in the “moral sciences” tripos along with psychology, logic, ethics and other fields. Marshall argued that “a lad, coming from school to this large and heterogeneous mass of difficult notions entirely strange to him, is bewildered”, and would be left “unripe”.
“The status of economics...appears to have been at a rather low point,” Neil Hart writes in the forthcoming “Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics”. It was looked on as “a minor and disputed area of study, with many of its lecturers and professors recruited or ‘borrowed’ from other established disciplines.” Exam questions reflected the fuzziness of the field’s boundaries. One paper in 1871 asked students to consider whether political economy had more to learn from ethics or vice versa. As was the way of the times, economic issues were seen through the lenses of personal, national and, particularly, class advantage. For example: “If any one had private information that war was about to break out between England and America, what sort of changes in his investments might it be prudent for him to make?” And: “Examine the probable results, to the different classes of English society, if the anticipated decline and ultimate exhaustion of our coalfields were to commence at once.”
Not good enough, Marshall thought. The complexities of the first globalised economy and the accompanying intensification of social problems meant the empire needed more and better economists. Cambridge, he argued, should meet that need by producing professionals with “three years’ scientific training of the same character and on the same general lines as that given to physicists, to physiologists or engineers.” His textbook of 1890, “Principles of Economics,” offered a tidy blueprint.
The Principled stand
Marshall’s book established the use of diagrams to illustrate economic phenomena, inventing the demand and supply curves familiar to fledgling economists ever since. And it provided a view of the economy as a dynamic system akin to a physical one, so complicated that it was best broken into parts. Its partial equilibrium analysis, which held some bits of the economy constant to clarify movements in the others, gave economists a way to carve smaller questions from the complex whole. Along with David Ricardo’s “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” and Karl Marx’s “Capital” it was one of the three most influential economics books of the 19th century.
Marshall was horrified to see Pigou in a Norfolk jacket with holes in both elbows: “So bad for the economics tripos!”
The independent tripos Marshall wanted finally got off the ground in 1903. Its courses were not all curves and equations. His first syllabus expected students to know about the British constitution and to opine on topics like “the use of the term ‘natural’ in economic writings” or “economic aims as a factor in international politics”. But it was already more practical. In a module from 1907 called “Advanced economics: mainly realistic” students were asked to “give some account of industrial arbitration in New Zealand.” The overall idea was to cultivate economics as no more, or less, than “a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.”
In 1908 Marshall handed over the reins to Arthur Pigou. A shy 30-year-old and keen mountaineer, Pigou had something of the 19th-century polymath about him. He had started off studying history and had won the university’s poetry prize for his ode to Alfred the Great before switching to the moral-sciences tripos in 1899 to study economics and ethics. Known around Cambridge—unoriginally and, one imagines, rather unhelpfully—as “The Prof”, he had a reputation as one of the city’s worst-dressed men. Marshall was once horrified to see him in a Norfolk jacket with holes in both elbows: “So bad for the economics tripos!”
Whatever his sartorial shortcomings, Pigou’s academic brilliance made him an obvious heir to Marshall. And as the author of “The Economics of Welfare”, he furthered Marshall’s cause by helping economists turn nettlesome political controversies into technical problems. Before he came along, decisions to meddle in markets were seen as helping one constituency over another, at the cost of inefficiency. He himself railed against the protectionism and imperial preference of the time, worrying that they were bungs to a small segment of the population.
In other cases, though, he showed that when there are external costs to someone’s actions, a bit of meddling might improve on the market outcome. For example, those who ignore the effects of their pollution on others will pollute too much. A nifty tax to align the individual’s incentives with those of society can mean better outcomes for everyone. Armed with this idea, economists could argue for intervention on technical grounds of efficiency.
Marshall championed Pigou; but his favourite student was Keynes, who came to one of Marshall’s courses after taking his mathematics degree in 1905. In 1909 Keynes returned to lecture on monetary economics. When he spoke in his essay on Marshall of a master economist as “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher” Keynes could have been describing himself (and perhaps he was: modesty was certainly not part of the recipe). Hopping between roles as an academic, civil servant, government adviser and journalist, he took vigorous part on the biggest topics of the day; his pamphlet arguing against self-defeating economic reparations on Germany, “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, made him rich and famous.
Like Pigou, Keynes emphasised that individually sensible decisions might be disastrous for society. He did not have the troves of data that economists have today, but could see that the mass unemployment of the 1930s was the result of a deep market failure: the queues of people on the dole were unwillingly unemployed. In defiance of the consensus that overall the economy would right itself, he thought that economies could end up trapped in deep and nasty slumps simply because of self-fulfilling losses of confidence. The solution was government intervention, in the form of an injection of public spending and confidence. His work justified policy intervention as an antidote to capitalism’s imperfections, to save it rather than to replace it; and it did so, as Pigou’s had, with the help of apparently dispassionate technical argument.
Technical fixers
Keynes and Pigou established economics as a toolkit to be used by policymakers, and pioneered the role of government economic advisers. Keynes famously remarked that “practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”; his policy activism was designed to replace that unexamined received opinion from the past with explicitly stated apposite analysis from the present. When the British government created a Committee of Economists to advise it in 1930, Keynes and Pigou were both appointed to it. Meanwhile Cambridge strove to produce more of their ilk. Through the 1920s and 1930s Keynes delivered eight lectures a year on his work in progress, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, and created an intellectual hub of economic disciples, known as the “Cambridge circus”. A group of younger members of the faculty began meeting in 1930 to discuss Keynes’s “A Treatise on Money,” published that same year. Specially selected undergraduates could go along too.
Students were by this time expected to take on board a lot more mathematics and theory than they had before. When he visited Cambridge in the 1940s, shortly before Keynes’s death, Harry Johnson, a Canadian economist, was struck by how much more demanding the tripos had become. Once, he wrote, all you had to do to pass the exams was read Marshall’s “Principles” over the course of the year and the Times at breakfast every morning; the rest of the day was free for being “out on the river with God”. By the time he arrived, finalists had to read Keynes’s “General Theory” from cover to cover, and digest intellectual debates such as those between Keynes and D.H. Robertson, a close collaborator who became an intellectual rival, on the “liquidity preference” and “loanable funds” theories of interest. (The heat of debate spilled over into exams: a student of 1947 asked to consider the criticism that “Lord Keynes’ doctrine of liquidity preference ‘seems to leave interest hanging by its own bootstraps’” might reasonably have wanted to know who the examiner would be before answering.)
The flatter world
The Cambridge faculty, though still impressive, has inevitably fallen back from the dizzy heights it occupied from the 1920s to the 1940s. Keynes shook up the settled consensus, codifiable in the textbooks of Marshall and Pigou. The next time a consensus settled within economics, it was forged in a different Cambridge, that of Massachusetts. A post-war intellectual backlash against Keynesianism relegated the original Cambridge to a dissident backwater, condemned to critique the mainstream from outside.
Today the faculty no longer nurtures its own school of thought, but it still suffers from the post-imperial shift towards America’s high-paying universities. Yet even among them, none towers as the Cambridge of Pigou and Keynes once did. The general success of the profession, and the institutional growth that has gone along with it, have made it hard for any single school to achieve true pre-eminence. Nor are battle lines drawn as once they were. Economists have largely fulfilled Marshall���s aim of rising from muddy ideological debates; the biggest fights today are between methodologies, not ideologies.
Keynes and Pigou transformed the discipline with new grand theories of how the economic system works while taking an active part in policy and encouraging others to do the same. The role for economic advice thus created has remained. But in Britain, in particular, the settled opinions of the broad church mean that such advice has been to some extent commoditised. Philosophers and grand debaters have been replaced with specialists building ever more intricate models and finding increasingly sophisticated ways of drawing lessons from data.
Hamish Low, a Cambridge professor who works in applied economics, does not mourn the loss of philosopher kings’ grand intellectual debates. “Now we need to be much more evidence based”, he says. But the discipline’s development has come with a cost. The specialisation associated with expertise can encourage narrow thinking. “Disciplines are now defined too much by methods rather than by questions”, Low says. This narrowness feeds through to policy advice, which too often applies established models to current circumstances, rather than considering fundamental reinterpretions of the issues. Economists can give you an estimate of how much revenue a tax increase will raise, the income loss associated with Brexit, or the employment effects of a minimum wage rise. It calls to mind another aphorism from Keynes about economists being at their best as “humble, competent people on a level with dentists”, using their technical skill to solve pressing problems within a limited area of expertise.
Underlying this intellectual timidity is a bigger failing. After his enjoyably rigorous lecture on macroeconomics, Mr Groom’s second taste of his department comes from Ha-Joon Chang, author of popular books such as “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”. At the heart of Marshall’s desire to separate economics from politics, Mr Chang explains to his rapt audience, lay a contradiction: “Economics is about economic policy, whose making is political.” The new space Marshall carved out for economics, and his new way of teaching it, left the discipline better equipped to inform politics disinterestedly. But the politics were always already there. As the discipline focused more and more on technicalities and models this persistent presence slipped from view. But though it was hidden, its power remained—all the more pernicious for being unseen and thus unquestioned.
As Mr Chang explains to his students, seeing politics as an external factor affecting how economic theory translates into policy can be a useful approximation. But that approximation ignores the rest of the system—the part where economic theory and politics influence each other’s evolution. So, for example, economists have busied themselves constructing models of preference without asking through what exercise of power those preferences were formed. While some spotted the colossal rise in income inequality that took place in Britain and America from the 1980s, they have, until quite recently, tended to dismiss it as primarily a political issue. They are all too often silent on just the sort of questions the tripos used to see as crucial: the rights and duties of shareholders; alternatives to democracy; the effect of the exhaustion of fossil fuels; the meaning, if any, of the word “natural”.
If economists really were dentists, this might be fine; no one needs a political ideology of cavities to perform a root canal. And living without dentistry is a dreadful thing. But Keynes at best only half believed his dentist conceit. He also wanted the “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher”: aloof; earthy; purposeful. Not every economist can be all those things, nor could they ever. But if the old aspiration to try and be so is lost, so is part of Marshall’s original dream of economists seeking not merely to apply their ideas in a worldly way, but to produce both better ideas and, in the end, a better world.

The world according to Putin - Economist

WHEN Vladimir Putin justified his annexation of Crimea on the ground that he owed protection to Russian speakers everywhere, this newspaper took a dim view of his line of argument, pointing out that since linguistic borders do not match those of states, it would lead to chaos. We now recognise that this approach to international relations betrayed a deplorable conservatism. Since we pride ourselves on pushing the boundaries in search of a way to clamber out of the box and reach the summit of blue-sky thinking, we reckoned we should grasp the nettle of radical Putinism and run with it. We have, therefore, redrawn the world’s boundaries according to Mr Putin’s principles. We think readers will agree that the resulting map has considerable appeal.
Under Mr Putin’s dispensation, things look up for the old colonial powers. Portugal gets to reclaim Brazil, Spain most of the rest of Central and South America and France most of west Africa, which would probably be fine by the locals, since many of their current governments are not much cop. A mighty Scandinavian kingdom comes into being—including Finland, although Finnish is very different from the Scandinavian tongues. Since Swedish is Finland’s second language, the Vikings would have strong grounds for bringing about the sort of peaceful merger based on shared cultural values for which they are famous.
A unified Arabia would stretch from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. There might be the odd squabble between Sunnis, Shias, Christians and adherents of archaic notions of nation; but united by a common tongue, the Arabs would be sure to get along fine, especially if they teamed up to smite the Persian-speakers on the other side of the Gulf. The two Koreas would become one, which might be a good thing—or not, depending on which system prevailed.
Since Hindi and Urdu are both a mutually intelligible mixture of Sanskrit and Persian, India could make a claim for Pakistan—and vice versa. The existence of nuclear weapons on either side would bring added spark to the debate over linguistic precedence.
Best of all, Britain would regain its empire, including—since it spoke English first—the United States. It would, obviously, give Barack Obama a prestigious position—Keeper of the Woolsack, say—and a nice uniform. Britain might, however, have to surrender some of London’s oligarch-dominated streets, as well as Chelsea Football Club, to Russia. A sizeable minority of The Economist’s staff also speaks Russian and would like to claim Mr Putin’s protection in advance of the next pay negotiations.
There is, however a hitch. Consolidation would be undermined by linguistic independence movements. Dozens of segments would peel away from Mandarin-speaking China. Mayaland would agitate for autonomy in Central America. Swahililand would demand independence in Africa. The world’s 7 billion people speak more than 7,000 languages; in Russia alone there are more than 100. Perhaps, on second thoughts, Mr Putin should quit while he is ahead.

How will Trump deal with North Korea - CNN

(CNN)North Korean leader Kim Jong Un heads into 2017 with two things that loom ominous for the rest of the world -- he's tested a nuclear weapon, and no one really knows how willing he'd be to use one in anger.

North Korea conducted two nuclear tests in 2016, one in January and another, its most powerful ever, in September. Add that to a string of missile tests, both land- and sea-launched, and the world has plenty of reason for worry.

"Combining nuclear warheads with ballistic missile technology in the hands of a volatile leader like Kim Jong Un is a recipe for disaster," Adm. Harry Harris, the head of the US military's Pacific Command, said in a December speech.

Kim Jong Un might be considered the world's most dangerous man.

Bruce Bennett, senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation think tank

Bruce Bennett, senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation think tank, went further still, saying Kim "might be considered the world's most dangerous man."

But just how much of a threat does North Korea pose?

Pyongyang's September test put North Korea's nuclear program in its strongest position ever, at least according to the Kim regime, which claimed to have successfully detonated a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on ballistic rockets.

North Korean state media said the test would enable North Korea to produce "a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power." Western experts fear that could expand the range of North Korea's nuclear weapons, possibly putting Alaska, Hawaii or even the US mainland in danger.

Combining nuclear warheads with ballistic missile technology in the hands of a volatile leader like Kim Jong Un is a recipe for disaster.

Adm. Harry Harris, the head of the US military's Pacific Command,

The warhead tested in September was estimated to have a 10-kiloton explosive power, almost twice as large as the one tested in January, said Kim Nam-wook of South Korea's Meteorological Administration. The atomic bomb dropped by the US on Hiroshima in 1945 is estimated at 15 kilotons.

Despite Pyongyang's apparent progress on a warhead, Bennett, the Rand analyst, points out that North Korea's test of its delivery systems, those missiles and rockets, weren't promising enough to make it a global threat -- at least not yet.

"To be such, the North would need to have developed some form of reliable delivery mechanism for its nuclear weapons that could reach anywhere in the world. And the North has not yet done that," Bennett said, pointing out that of the eight tests of longer range missiles (2,000 miles or more), seven were considered failures, and the other was tested only over a short range.

And despite testing a submarine-launched missile in August, the North has only one submarine capable of launching such a missile -- and its range is short, making it unlikely to get past Western defenses to pose a threat beyond Asia, added Bennett.

Doubts about its delivery capabilities notwithstanding, North Korea remains the only country on Earth to test a nuclear weapon in the 21st century -- and that offers Kim considerable leverage, analysts say, especially with his continued ability to tolerate the West's only real weapon short of military action, economic sanctions.

"The sanctions would undoubtedly deter North Korea's economy and make the country further isolated ... but Kim Jong Un and his associates believe it is still worth it for them to have an advanced nuclear capability," said Seung-Kyun Ko, a professor at Hawaii Pacific University and a former research commissioner in South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Nuclear weapons are "a tool for giving the oppressed people pride and hope," Ko said.

The voraciousness of Kim's "nukes at all costs" philosophy was hammered home just this week when a high-ranking North Korean diplomat who defected to the South earlier this year said Kim wouldn't back down even if offered huge sums of money by Western powers.

Thae Yong-ho, formerly No. 2 at the North Korean Embassy in London, said Kim is "racing ahead with nuclear development after setting up a plan to develop nuclear weapons at all costs by the end of 2017."

The suggestion that Kim can't be bought off is echoed by Boris Toucas, a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"Kim Jong Un has made the development of the nuclear program its main source of legitimacy, connecting his fate to what he sees as the greatness of his nation, well before economic progress," Toucas wrote in October, shortly after Pyongyang's second nuclear test of 2016.

Kim -- An unstable madman or a calculating mastermind?

Analysts agree that Kim is far from the unstable madman many present him to be. In fact, Ko, the former South Korean Foreign Ministry official, called the North Korean leader "cautious and calculating."

For instance, Ko said, Kim knows he can use the annual string of US-South Korean military exercises, involving thousands of troops and the latest US weaponry, to his advantage.

"He demands from his people and subordinates complete obedience to his leadership, because the country is on the verge of imminent invasion from the US and South Korea," Ko said. "He creates cohesion and unity among his people in facing the invasion."

While he keeps his people in line with talks of an impending invasion, he keeps his adversaries off balance by talking peace.

"Kim continues to pursue a peace treaty with United States," explained Bennett, the RAND expert. "And if he succeeds in getting such a treaty, it is entirely possible that US forces would be withdrawn from South Korea within a few years, likely to never return."

In other words, Kim wins if US troops get off his doorstep.

Is Kim smelling blood in a Trump-led U.S.?

Thae, the defected diplomat from the North, said this week that Kim senses weakness in the US and South Korea right now.

"Due to domestic political procedures, North Korea calculates that South Korea and the US will not be able to take physical or military actions to deter North Korea's nuclear development," the defector said at a news briefing in Seoul.

Those "domestic political procedures" include the impeachment case against South Korea President Park Geun-hye over a corruption scandal and the upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump as US President.

But Trump could be a wild card, perhaps as spontaneous as Kim is calculating.

Take Trump's comments on Taiwan and the South China Sea, for example. They might be helping mend the strained but traditional alliance between North Korea and China.

It's an interesting tale of two alpha males and how they're sniffing each other out at this point.

Jasper Kim, professor at of Ewha Women's University in Seoul

"While most observers argue that North Korea successfully exploits the distrust between China and the United States, they often overlook the fact that distrust between North Korea and China has grown at an even greater pace over the past few years, with North Korea constantly embarrassing its neighbor," Toucas, a former official in the French Foreign Ministry, wrote in October, reiterating that any Western deal with North Korea would need Beijing on board.

It's the kind of thing that could leave Kim wondering just what he is facing with the incoming leader of the free world.

"I think Kim Jong Un doesn't know how to size up this person, and vice versa," said Jasper Kim, a professor at of Ewha Women's University in Seoul. "It's an interesting tale of two alpha males and how they're sniffing each other out at this point."

So, what to expect in 2017?

The beginning of the year, at least, could be quiet.

"I heard from a North Korean official that they do not want to make any provocative actions until they know what kind of North Korean policies are in the next administration," said Park Hwee-Rhak, of Kookmin University in Seoul.

How will Trump handle North Korea? 02:42

That means the initiative may be Trump's. He's said he would consider pulling US troops from South Korea. He's even said he might be willing to meet the North Korean leader for discussions over a hamburger, something that would please Kim, who "craves recognition as much as he does nuclear weapons," according to Toucas.

But Trump has also called Kim "a maniac" who needs to be dealt with harshly -- a course of action Park thinks Trump should take.

"I think Mr. Trump should play hard ball. I think he should ask for a review and consideration of the military options, including pre-emptive strikes," Park said.

But if Kim thinks that's in the works, Ko said the North Korean leader could strike out fiercely.

"He tends to be blunt and a bit extreme in his responses to his perceived threats."

CNN's Paula Hancocks contributed to this report.

CNN

US agencies that will keep Trump in check - Huffington Post

WASHINGTON ― Republicans are taking control of the executive branch and both chambers of the legislative branch next month, giving them essentially full control of the federal government.

So besides journalists, who will track what Attorney General Jeff Sessions does to the Justice Department’s civil rights portfolio? Or watch for conflicts of interest involving Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon? Or keep an eye on what Rick Perry does at the Energy Department, which the former Texas governor famously forgot he wanted to eliminate? Or make sure the General Services Administration isn’t doing any special favors for the president-elect on his company’s lease of the Old Post Office, now home to the Trump International Hotel?

That’s where the inspectors general could come in. Presuming President Donald Trumplets them stick around.

The federal inspectors general system was formed some 38 years ago, tasking the appointed official with the job of rooting out fraud, waste and abuse within federal agencies, offering recommendations that could save taxpayers billions of dollars. Effective ones try to help the agency implement reform when issues are discovered, and keep track of the top management problems at each agency. Trump, whose incoming administration will face a huge number of potential conflicts of interest, could put the work of federal watchdogs front and center.

Inspectors general not only conduct oversight, they help build trust and confidence in government among the public in an era when trust in the federal government is low. Voters just elected a candidate who has painted the nation’s government as entirely corrupt, and who at random calls for the dismantling of agencies. And while inspectors general disagreements with politically appointed agency heads are typically limited to sternly worded letters, it isn’t tough to imagine Trump getting into a Twitter war with a government watchdog who issues a report critical of his administration.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, expects inspectors general to be busier than ever under Trump, expressing concern over a number of the people the businessman has picked for his cabinet.

in, inspectors general will be playing a very, very significant role because he seems to, in some instances, lack transparency and seems to want to engage in secrecy at times,” Cummings told The Huffington Post. 

Inspectors general are one of the “very few backstops” left, Cummings warned. 

“When you have the government now controlled by one party you really must have something, somebody to look over the shoulders of these agencies,” he said. 

There is, however, the potential that Trump could get rid of the inspectors general en masse. That’s something that hasn’t been tried since President Ronald Reagan firedmost of the country’s inspectors general on the second day of his presidency. Reagan’s move caused significant controversy, and several of the inspectors general were eventually hired back. 

“I think that left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth,” said Michael Bromwich, who formerly served as inspector general for the Justice Department. He noted that IGs were a “relatively new phenomenon” at the beginning of Reagan’s first term, and that there’s much broader recognition of the importance of IGs several decades later. Bromwich does not expect Trump to take the same approach.

“I think it’s unlikely that it would be repeated, because I think a lot of people are still around who remember that and what a fiasco it was,” Bromwich said. “But obviously one can’t be sure.”

Since Reagan’s move nearly 36 years ago, inspectors general have stayed on when presidential administrations change. But Trump has already broken with other longstanding traditions ― he’s the first major party candidate since 1976 not to release his full income tax returns, for example. If he wants, he could also decide to replace all of the inspectors general upon taking office.

“There is nothing stopping him from doing that,” says Nick Pacifico of the Project on Government Oversight, which tracks vacancies in inspectors general offices. “It’s sort of up in the air.”

If Trump did decide to discharge the inspectors general, he would have to provide an explanation to the House and Senate 30 days before any dismissal under current law. But his explanation to Congress doesn’t necessarily have to be very in-depth. When President Barack Obama dismissed the inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service in 2009, he simply stated that he “no longer” had “the fullest confidence” in Gerald Walpin, who was a George W. Bush appointee.

There are 73 federal inspectors general, about half of whom are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. They are required to be appointed based only on “integrity and demonstrated ability in accounting, auditing, financial analysis, law, management analysis, public administration, or investigations.” Politics isn’t supposed to come into play.

Though their role is meant to be nonpartisan, most of the permanent inspectors general currently in place are Obama appointees. But there are 10 presidentially appointed IG vacancies, including at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and the Office of Personnel Management. With just three weeks until Trump’s inauguration, it seems increasingly likely that the 45th president will eventually choose nominees to fill those key positions.

Leaving those positions open is a recipe for disaster, Bromwich said. “These are all very significant IG positions, and one concern I have based in part on what happened in the early days of the George W. Bush administration is the selection of nominees that kind of defy the nonpartisan requirement that’s in the statute,” Bromwich said. IG positions aren’t meant to be political handouts to allies and fundraisers, he said.

Bromwich also said there could be some increased friction between some inspectors general and agency heads given that many Trump nominees don’t have experience in the federal government. Individuals who worked in the private sector, for example, would not be used to having an independent watchdog on their back.

“I do think there’s a risk when you’re introducing so many people who have either never been in government service at all or who have never been in federal government service,” Bromwich said. “Getting them to understand and get used to what the requirements are, I think that will probably produce some additional work for IGs in terms of investigating allegations of misconduct.”

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment on whether it expects to replace any or all of the inspectors general. 

A bill authored by Cummings and Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the oversight committee, gives an inspector general more access to documents necessary in determining waste, fraud and abuse at an agency he or she oversees. One downfall, Cummings said, is that a provision granting the watchdogs subpoena power didn’t make it into the final bill Obama ultimately signed this month. (Chaffetz was not available for an interview by the time of publication.)

Cummings expects a “whole slew” of career employees at each agency to start lining up to talk to their inspector general, and some to come to Congress directly. When that happens, he hopes his Republican colleagues will stand by their promises to protect whistleblowers. 

“When we show whistleblowers we are not going to protect them the whole whistleblower system falls apart,” Cummings said. “And if we don’t have whistleblowers we will have lost our last line of defense, and when I say ‘we’ I mean the American people.”

The role of the inspector general isn’t strictly adversarial. IGs can be an asset to an administration in that they can help head off potential problems before they balloon into scandals that change the course of history.

Take former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Her use of a personal email server to conduct State Department business became a major issue in her presidential campaign, and was a significant factor in her defeat.

One source who spent decades at the State Department pointed out that there was no permanent, confirmed inspector general during Clinton’s entire term as secretary of state. While there’s no way to know for sure, a permanent inspector general operating independently could have raised the private email server issue with Clinton’s team long before it dominated the political discourse as Americans chose the next commander in chief.

Now that Trump has been elected president, the role of inspectors general could potentially shift, as several potential agency heads appear to be opposed to the core mission of the agencies they wish to lead. Cummings said he’s troubled by some of Trump’s picks, like former Texas governor Perry to lead the Energy Department and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency. (The Energy Department, notably, currently lacks a permanent IG. Obama nominee Susan F. Beard has been awaiting confirmation since April.) Trump selected people who “are bent on basically taking apart the agencies that they are now being assigned to,” Cummings said.

But there are limits on an inspector general’s role. POGO’s Pacifico said IGs were an “invaluable check” ― particularly when one party controls the federal government ― and can give a unique perspective to an incoming administration to help ease a transition. It can get dicey, however, if IGs attempt to assert that an administration isn’t fulfilling its mission, as they are centrally focused on combatting waste, fraud and abuse.

“The problem is that there’s nothing in the law specifically that would allow them to make sure that an agency’s agenda is followed, and that is a main concern among many people,” Pacifico said. “The IGs don’t really have specific power aside from informing Congress what is going on.”

Bromwich said it’s “tricky” for IGs to look at whether an agency has fulfilled its mission because the executive branch has wide latitude to implement various statutes.

The problem is that there’s nothing in the law specifically that would allow them to make sure that an agency’s agenda is followed, and that is a main concern among many people.Nick Pacifico, Project on Government Oversight

“There certainly can be both program reviews and audits that an IG can do to get at whether a particular program authorized by Congress is in fact being implemented in the way envisioned by Congress and required by the statute,” Bromwich said. “But I think it may be trickier than most people think for an IG to go in and say ‘Oh, because he’s not devoting any resources to this program, he’s actually undermining the purposes of the agency.’”

Despite those limits, Daniel Feldman, co-author of The Art of The Watchdog and a criminal justice professor at CUNY, is hopeful they will prove themselves as a critical check in coming years. But it will all depend on who fills the posts. 

“The effectiveness as a watchdog depends at least as much on who you are as on what you know,” Feldman writes in his book, co-authored by David R. Eichenthal. “The best public watchdogs combine a powerful indignation with relentless persistence.” 

Feldman’s optimism for inspectors general is based on what he considers the inherent divisions between the different branches of government. “The legislative and executive are natural enemies,” he said in an interview. 

“Institutional factors will themselves result in some degree of effectiveness of IGs,” he said. “If history is any guide, but maybe it isn’t, there is an institutional conflict and my best prediction is that at a certain point in time, no more than a year from now, you will begin to see friction between the legislative branch and the executive branch.”

“Yeah, there will be a honeymoon period,” he said. “But I doubt that it will last forever.”