“My car is loaded to the gills,” Johnston said Wednesday morning from the road. “This is the second time I’ll be in Washington. I was a lot younger when I did this the first time.”
She worked for then-Sen. James Jeffords, a longtime Republican, as a legislative aide before tracking Jeffords’ constituent mail from Vermonters. Jeffords left his party in 2001 to become an independent.
Johnston said that when she arrives in Washington she will begin work on Trump’s inaugural committee, which is charged with organizing logistics of the swearing-in ceremony and a series of opulent balls to follow the main event.
She was the only paid Trump staffer in Vermont, and much of her work focused on neighboring New Hampshire. She organized volunteer trips to the Granite State in the five weekends leading up to Election Day. (Trump narrowly lost to Democrat Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.)
Johnston said that after the Jan. 20 inauguration she will transition into a policy role in the Trump administration, though she doesn’t know yet what exactly her post will be. She said the job offer came via a Trump aide.
“I know almost nothing right now,” she said. “I’ll start (Thursday) at the office, and I’ll learn a lot more at that point.”
Johnston said ideally she would transition to a job in the Department of Health and Human Services once Trump takes office.
In an interview with VTDigger after the election, Johnston said she knew Trump was going to win in January, after he whipped up a passionate crowd in the liberal mecca of Burlington.
“It was about his willingness to come into what was clearly an unfriendly or certainly unknown type of venue and audience in the belly of the beast of Bernie Sanders’ hometown, and I just thought the candidate that has the courage to do that was going to have a real shot at winning,” Johnston said.
Johnston has been a vocal critic of Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin’s health care policies, including his abandoned push for single-payer health care. Johnston also ran Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping government hands out of the health care economy.
Trump has vowed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and his pick to lead Health and Human Services, Rep. Tom Price, of Georgia, was the first lawmaker to draft a full replacement bill for the ACA.
Price’s bill would remove various health care protections set forth in the ACA, which was one of President Barack Obama’s signature achievements.
Price’s bill would, among other things, eliminate the federal mandate that all Americans have health insurance or pay a tax penalty. It would also do away with the requirement for large employers to offer coverage and would scale back billions of dollars in expanded Medicaid funding, according to The New York Times.
Johnston hailed Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Atlanta, for his work to dismantle Obamacare.
“I think he’s great, he’s fabulous,” Johnston said. “He worked with the Congress, he was chairman of the budget committee. He knows the issue from a health care perspective as well as from the budget side of things.”
Johnston said she hoped HHS would “bring everybody to the table” as new health care policy is considered. She said she wasn’t sure exactly what sort of reforms she would push for if installed there.
