Carson Is New Sign Trump Plans to Govern From the Right

                            

Ben Carson spoke with Donald J. Trump before endorsing him at Mar-a-Lago in West Palm Beach, Fla., in March. CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump is moving to repudiate vast parts of President Obama’s domestic agenda as he fills his cabinet with conservatives who have long records opposing the current administration on social programs, wages, public lands, veterans and the environment.

Mr. Trump’s selections to lead the Departments of Education, Commerce, Justice, and Health and Human Services, and the names under consideration for other federal agencies with broad authority over the lives of Americans, have cheered Republicans in Washington, who have spent eight years battling Mr. Obama’s administration.

“It’s a recognition that elections have consequences,” said Thomas M. Davis, a former congressman from Virginia, who said he was impressed by the ideological philosophy of Mr. Trump’s domestic agency appointments. “Republican philosophy says markets can do a better job. It’s a huge clash with Obama.”

Early Monday morning, Mr. Trump announced that he intended to nominate Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, to be the secretary of housing and urban development. In that post, Mr. Carson, who enthusiastically backed Mr. Trump’s candidacy after dropping his own, will oversee the federal agency that fights urban blight, provides rental assistance and helps homeowners battle foreclosures.If he is confirmed, Mr. Carson will embrace a starkly different approach to those problems, compared with housing secretaries during Mr. Obama’s tenure. He opposes government programs that he says encourage “dependency,” and he has been fiercely critical of housing programs intended to end segregation.

“These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse,” Mr. Carson wrote last year, describing the Obama administration’s efforts to promote fair housing practices as dangerous “social-engineering schemes.”

Mr. Carson joins a growing cast of nominees who, if confirmed, will assume control of hundreds of thousands of federal employees as they seek to shift policies developed during nearly a decade of Democratic governance.

Aside from his focus on immigration and the Affordable Care Act, Mr. Trump spent little time on the campaign trail detailing a specific policy agenda. But many of his nominees have spent their careers advocating positions that will now become the focus of examination during their confirmation hearings. Taken together, they suggest an administration determined to alter course on immigration, abortion, housing laws, the environment, worker protections and privatization of federal functions.

“We will learn a lot more during the hearings,” said Michael R. Strain, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Certainly, I think it’s different than what we’ve seen in the last eight years.”

                            

Andrew Puzder, a wealthy California donor to Mr. Trump’s campaign, is said to be a leading candidate to be his nominee for labor secretary. CreditHilary Swift for The New York Times

Mr. Trump’s choices for prominent national security jobs — attorney general, defense secretary, national security adviser, C.I.A. director — have already begun to more firmly establish the contours of his approach to foreign policy, even as he struggles to settle on someone to be the nation’s top diplomat as secretary of state.

On the domestic front, announcements of several cabinet posts are helping to define the new president’s approach to issues at home. His choices so far suggest a more conservative approach to many domestic issues than Mr. Trump himself articulated during the campaign.

This week, Mr. Trump is expected to fill a series of positions that will accelerate the U-turn from current policies.

He is said to be seriously considering Mary Fallin, Oklahoma’s Republican governor, for interior secretary, which would presage a shift away from the department’s current approach toward energy and public lands. Mr. Obama has aggressively sought to shut down fossil fuel production and increase the use of renewable sources of energy, while Ms. Fallin is an outspoken proponent of drilling and fracking on public lands. She was the first governor to announce she would oppose Mr. Obama’s proposed rules on emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Andrew F. Puzder, a wealthy California donor to Mr. Trump’s campaign whose company, CKE Restaurants, oversees chains such as Hardee’s, is said to be a leading candidate for labor secretary. Mr. Puzder has been extremely critical of the Obama administration’s labor policies, including its push for a higher minimum wage and for new overtime rules for workers.On his personal blog, Mr. Puzder has been vocal in his criticism of Mr. Obama and, more recently, laudatory of Mr. Trump. His latest post, titled “Overregulation has hurt the restaurant industry, jobs & the economy but Trump’s win will reverse that narrative,” argues that current policy has led to a “government-mandated restaurant recession.”

And former Senator Scott Brown, a Massachusetts Republican, may get the nod to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs. Mr. Brown, who met with the president-elect last month about taking the job, might reverse the current administration’s opposition to privatizing parts of the department.

“We’re going to have to outsource some of those cases to private vendors, obviously,” Mr. Brown told reporters at Trump Tower after his meeting. “We’ve got to work with the Department of Defense so when that soon-to-be-veteran actually leaves the D.O.D., we know what his or her needs are. There’s a breakdown there.”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump’s transition said Monday that several cabinet announcements and White House staffing decisions were “likely” this week, following the president-elect’s recent picks to oversee the Education, Health and Human Services, Justice and Commerce Departments.

Last month, Mr. Trump announced that he had chosen Betsy DeVos to lead the Education Department. Ms. DeVos, a longtime Republican fund-raiser, has spent nearly 30 years pushing for families to receive public funds to send their children to private and parochial schools, usually to the consternation of teacher unions.She is certain to challenge the approach that Mr. Obama and his administration have followed, often with the support of those same unions. After being chosen by Mr. Trump, she wrote on her Facebook page, “The status quo in ed is not acceptable.”

Mr. Trump’s choice to take over the Department of Health and Human Services, Representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia, is a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act and supported legislation to block federal funds for Planned Parenthood.

His pick for commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor, is likely to echo the president-elect’s views on trade. That would give him the ability to shift American policy away from the pro-trade approach that Mr. Obama embraced.

And Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Mr. Trump’s pick to be the next attorney general, has long been a fierce advocate of a crackdown on immigrants who are in the country illegally. He was one of the most vocal opponents of an immigration overhaul, calling it amnesty. And in speeches from the floor of the Senate, he railed against Mr. Obama’s executive actions aimed at protecting some immigrants from deportation.

These choices have put Democrats and liberal activists on notice that the agenda in Washington is changing, Mr. Davis, the former congressman, said. “This is clearly not going to be pleasing to them,” he said.

In a statement last week, Richard L. Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said as much, reflecting on Mr. Trump’s nominations with dismay and predicting, or perhaps hoping, that Americans would reject the direction of his government as too extreme.

“Donald Trump the candidate claimed he would rein in the power of Wall Street traders, protect Social Security and Medicare, and ensure all kids have great schools,” Mr. Trumka said. “But his cabinet choices send a dangerous signal about how President-elect Trump will conduct his presidency.”