Description
Since 1947 - with the passage of the National Security Act – the U.S. Congress has attempted to compel the President to listen to a broader range of advice before making critical foreign policy decisions, and the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols act tried to further streamline this process. Some have utilized the NSC well, most notably Dwight Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush. Other U.S. presidents have hardly used it at all, with Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson coming most readily to mind. The approach taken by Donald Trump most closely resembles the informal ‘Tuesday Lunch’ meetings of Johnson and Ronald Reagan’s ‘one page’ approach to government, but it goes beyond that approach by utilizing an extremely fluid and ad hoc group of advisers as opposed to the small but stable groups used by Johnson and Reagan. The ‘government by tweet’ approach also most obviously differs from what previous presidents have done. But does this approach actually work in an instrumental sense? This paper argues that – while tweeting is useful for setting the overall direction of governmental activity and is similar in some ways to the manner in which Reagan would set overall goals but would leave all details to others - it fails to take account of the fact that American government is not a unitary whole but a broad array of organizations, many of which pull in different directions. These organizations may also successfully ‘shade’ and interpret higher-level decisions in an unintended way.
