Marco Rubio will likely miss games for his beloved Miami Dolphins.
Kristi Noem, of Mount Rushmore-state fame, may find a bit of home in the granite monuments in the nation’s capital.
And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may find kinship with Hollywood MAGA-lebrities like Jon Voight, Robert Davi and Kevin Sorbo.
The three, along with dozens of others, are expected to join a host of billionaires, a convicted felon who got a pardon, a Mar-a-Lago member, fathers-in-law, past and current legal representatives − and few of the D.C. “swamp” − to form Donald Trump’s second-term administration.
But most importantly, to the Make America Great Again base, the hires for his White House and federal agencies reflect a promise from the campaign trail to populate a government from across America and not the Beltway.
A USA TODAY review of almost 100 administration top hires, in fact, shows broad geographical diversity and representation: Nearly half of the 50 U.S. states have a potential representative in the second Trump administration.
During his third bid for the presidency in 2024, Trump railed against a “deep state” bureaucracy and vowed to move government decision-making out of Washington and to “places filled with patriots who love America.”
Those hires reflect that pledge, with just over a dozen people from the nation’s capital and surrounding suburbs in Northern Virginia and Maryland, the USA TODAY review found. The biggest draw were from his home states, New York and Florida, with just shy of two dozen picks.
After Trump won, those circling the president-elect emphatically insisted the perceived staffing mistakes in the first term would not repeated.
And so far, those voters who sent him to Washington like what they see.
“I trust his judgment,” said Yvonne Julian, 72, the Greenville County, South Carolina, GOP president. “He’s the first person that is really looking at the entire country.”
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump makes remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. January 7, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
Trump’s former, current home states win big
The Sunshine State, to which Trump moved his official residency in 2019, is poised to fill some of the biggest jobs in Washington: White House chief of staff, secretary of state, attorney general and national security adviser.
“There’s never been a better time to be a Republican from Florida,” said Peter Feaman, an attorney in Trump’s Palm Beach County who has represented the state on the Republican National Committee for 12 years. “It’s fantastic.”
New Jersey, California and the Dakotas, as with Noem, drew meaningful representation.
Whether that is by design or chance is a matter of speculation and conjecture. The press office for Trump’s transition team did not answer a request for comment.
From the vicinity of Mar-a-Lago, Feaman said he has marveled at how “smooth” and fast the hiring process has been this time versus 2016.
“Eight years ago, the transition was nothing like this,” he said. “The picks were a lot of Washington establishment people. He was taking advice from people who later turned out to be not his friend.”
Trust and loyalty appear to be common denominators, determinative factors on resumes
Donald Trump greets his campaign manager Susie Wiles during an election night event at the West Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, on November 6, 2024. Trump named Wiles his White House chief of staff.
Rubio, nominated for secretary of state, is Florida’s most high-profile Trump pick. He spent time in the Florida Legislature and is married to a former bank teller and Miami Dolphins cheerleader. Rubio once even made a football-themed ad − and repeatedly touted the Dolphins − for his unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign.
Susie Wiles, a Floridian who managed Trump’s campaign from start to finish, will run Trump’s White House as chief of staff. She deftly steadied the campaign, quelling the toxic fallout from a dinner with a white supremacist in November 2023, extinguishing a challenge from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and successfully pivoting to rival Kamala Harris last summer.
Trump Cabinet: No experience? No problem. Trump’s Cabinet raises concerns about government dysfunction.
Pam Bondi, who was Florida’s attorney general and is nominated to head the Justice Department, reportedly quashed an investigation into the defunct Trump University more than a decade ago, then defended Trump in his first U.S. Senate impeachment trial in early 2020. Alina Habba, who represented Trump in legal proceedings in New York, will join Trump’s White House legal staff.
The Dakotas got two significant Cabinet posts. Doug Burgum, who was North Dakota’s governor, will head the Interior Department after behaving politely as a presidential primary rival and then ardent surrogate in the fall campaign. Noem, who drew speculation as a running mate until she detailed shooting her dog in a book, will lead the Department of Homeland Security.
New York billionaire Howard Lutnick helped raise millions for Trump’s campaign and will serve as commerce secretary. Steve Witkoff, another billionaire who was golfing with Trump the day a suspected assailant targeted the GOP nominee for assassination, got a Middle East diplomatic assignment.
American business person Steve Witkoff makes remarks next to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. January 7, 2025.
There are others who are being rewarded for coming to Trump’s side in the clutch moments of the race against Harris − including Elon Musk and RFK Jr. The Tesla and Space X mogul co-leads the effort to cut as much as $2 trillion from the federal budget with former GOP rival Vivek Ramaswamy, and Kennedy has been nominated to head the Health and Human Services Department.
He becomes the first member of the Kennedy clan to join a presidential Cabinet since his father was attorney general while John F. Kennedy was president. Other Kennedy family members have served in Congress and in ambassadors and diplomatic envoys.
Trump hiring ‘from across the country,’ but is rejection of DC power players overstated?
Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, director of the Brookings Institution’s Katzmann Initiative on Improving Interbranch Relations and Government, acknowledged Trump has taken a different path than his predecessors, including his own administration four years ago.
She said his choices for the 15 Cabinet secretaries and other positions reflect a “variety of people from across the country.” And he has selected a mix of people with some federal − mostly in Congress − and state government experience.
But Tenpas cautioned against overstating the non-Washington perspective.
“There a couple things that go against that grain,” she said.
First, Trump has followed the pattern of other presidents-elect in using appointed political posts to reward loyalists and hire those who reflect important a constituencies or viewpoints.
That may speak, she said, to the appointments of ambassadors, including Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law, Jared, and whom he pardoned in his first term for a felony offense. Two others who received diplomatic posts are Kimberly Guilfoyle, former fiancee of Donald Trump Jr., and Peter Lamelas, a member of his Palm Beach private club.
Second, Tenpas said, Trump probably does not have a large group of Washington-based people to hire from after he fired a lot of people in senior positions during his first term. During a second administration, a lot of deputies and lower-ranking officials could get promoted, but “there was a lot of churn” in his first administration, she said.
U.S. Vice President-elect JD Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl., walk on Capitol Hill, on the day of a meeting with Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary on Nov. 21, 2024.
“Trump’s turnover was the highest. When you go back to Reagan, it was just off the charts,” said Tenpas, who created a widely watched presidential staff turnover tracker dating back to 1981. “He had just a huge number of firings and really high turnover compared to his predecessors.”
Another factor, she said, is the hiring of figures like Stephen Miller as White House deputy chief of staff for policy. Miller, Tenpas pointed out, was a member of the America First Legal Foundation. In addition, Tenpas cited the influence that other D.C.-based entities, including the America First Policy Institute and Heritage Foundation in the new administration.
Although Trump and his campaign disavowed Heritage’s Project 2025 during the campaign, the organization’s president introduced himself as “Kevin Roberts from Project 2025 and I’m here to help” during an appearance last month at Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s a little bit rich to sort of say he drained the swamp because actually he relied on the swamp for the last four years to try to help him get elected,” Tenpas said. “It’s not the same as Jimmy Carter coming up from Plains, Georgia, when he invited all those people from Georgia. It’s not like that.”
Swing states delivered Trump the presidency, but not many successful applicants for administration jobs
Though Trump won the popular vote Nov. 5, Trump’s decisive Electoral College victory was delivered by seven battleground state.
But those states − Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada − collectively drew fewer than 10 top jobs.
Of those, Georgia drew the bulk with former U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler (Small Business Administration chief) and David Perdue (U.S. ambassador to China) getting posts and former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins picked to lead Veterans Affairs. Kari Lake, an unsuccessful Arizona gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidate and prominent election denier, will head the Voice of America.
Another failed senatorial candidate, TV personality and physician Mehmet Oz from Pennsylvania, will serve as administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
As important as his state was in November, Pennsylvania U.S. Rep. Scott Perry insists there are plenty of talented conservatives from his state whom Trump could pull into the administration. But he noted the already-thin majority House Republicans possess and the brand-new GOP Senate seat filled by Sen. David McCormick.
“We don’t want to lose him already,” Perry said. “So that’s part of the situation as well.”
Overall, Perry said, Pennsylvanians are not disappointed.
“I don’t feel shorted at all,” Perry said. “We’re all happy that we’re going to have President Trump, whether you’re in Pennsylvania or Florida.”
Some deep red states also did not score tons of administration posts
A curious geographical footnote that emerges from the USA TODAY analysis is the symmetry of hires from the reddest of the red states, minus Florida, and the bluest of the blue states.
California got five hires, including RFK Jr., while Texas, long the nation’s conservative trophy state, got two, the Dakotas two and Tennessee one. But the Lone Star state’s representative, Musk, is arguably the most influential hire.
Like Perry, Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, said that he isn’t worried there have been few hires from his state to serve in Trump’s second administration and that “there could be more from Texas in the pipeline” to join the executive branch.
“He took a couple people out of Texas − they have Texas backgrounds − to serve in some form or fashion,” he said.
Nehls also dismissed concerns that hiring reflects state importance, one way or the other.
“Why would I be worried about any of that? I think if they’re all from one state, because there’s an enormous amount of talent in Florida, so be it,” Nehls said. “It is what it is, right? I don’t think we should go to the strategy and say, ‘Well, now you got to pick a lesser qualified person from Ohio’ because nobody’s been chosen out of Ohio or Texas or Michigan or something. Get picked as the best person for the job, right?”
To that end, Floridian Feaman concurs.
“Everything is coordinated. Everything is well planned out,” he said of the transition. “I think it’s much more exciting to watch it this time around than eight years ago. I really see an effort to pick people who are going to change the culture of Washington, D.C.”
Contributing: Terry Benjamin II, Greenville (S.C.) News.
Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump’s home states of New York, Florida most represented in new admin
