White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders would not say whether Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan will be tapped soon for the position permanently.
“I can tell you that the President has a great deal of respect for Acting Defense Secretary Shanahan. He likes him,” Sanders said during a press briefing Monday. “And when the President is ready to make an announcement on that front, he certainly will.”
Shanahan’s nomination would face some resistance in the Senate, even among some Republicans who have cooled on him since he took the acting title at the start of the year, as On Base has reported.
This is only the third time in our nation’s history that a secretary of defense has been in acting status for a prolonged period “and the first time there’s ever been a vacancy of more than one day without a nominee already named,” Jonathan Bernstein notes for Bloomberg.
DOD photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith
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