When Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wanted him to be his top deputy, Patrick Shanahan was instructed to focus “down and in,” as he describes the approach to managing the government’s largest bureaucracy.

But the former Boeing executive who came to be known as “Mr. Fix-It” — by turning around troubled programs such as the 787 Dreamliner aircraft — will now need to be much more outward facing as President Donald Trump’s acting Pentagon chief following the announcement Sunday that Mattis will depart Jan. 1, two months earlier than planned.

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Job one will be repairing the relationship between the White House and the top ranks, where Mattis, who is leaving after a stunning public break with the commander-in-chief, is still revered.

Gordon Adams, a former Democratic White House budget official specializing in defense, called Shanahan “a perfectly competent manager.”

“It is not clear how his competence will mesh with a president who is not,” he added.

Shanahan, who has been the Pentagon’s No. 2 for 18 months, is little known outside the halls of the national security community — and even there his views are not well understood.

A mechanical engineer by training with scant policy background, the public record of his positions is slim compared to Mattis, a retired four-star Marine general.

“Imagine if we drew a Venn diagram of Secretary Mattis and his skills and background and history and overlaid mine with it,” Shanahan told an defense industry group earlier this year. “At the very edge they would touch, and it’s because we’re both from Washington state.”

Mattis clashed with Trump over a host of issues — including Iran; Russia; Syria; the wisdom of using the military to police the southern border; Trump’s ban on transgender troops; and most prominently the president’s denigration of historic military allies and diplomatic and trade partners.

As a trusted lieutenant, however, Shanahan, 56, has played a prominent role in crafting a new National Defense Strategy placing renewed emphasis on military competition with Russia and China — a document that Mattis considers one of his major accomplishments.

But Shanahan has also been the Pentagon’s biggest booster for Trump’s proposal for a separate Space Force, which is now in its final stages before going to Congress in early 2019.

Here’s a rundown of some issues Shanahan has wrestled with in recent months and how his nomination to be deputy secretary was a bit choppy:

The Pentagon’s space man

Shanahan has been the Pentagon’s point person on efforts to reorganize the military space mission and a vocal champion of Trump’s Space Force, which remains unpopular in many military quarters.

He’s clashed with others in the department, including the Air Force, which would lose the most with the establishment of a new branch of the armed forces dedicated to space.

In November, he pushed back on a cost estimate floated by Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson projecting that standing up a Space Force would cost $13 billion over five years. Instead, he predicted a Space Force could cost less than $5 billion.

The budgeteer

In his role as the Pentagon’s day-to-day manager, Shanahan has played a large role in building out the Pentagon’s fiscal 2019 and 2020 budget requests, in addition to overseeing the crafting of a new National Defense Strategy.

After Trump called for federal agencies to cut their forthcoming budgets to blunt a deficit that’s approaching $1 trillion, Shanahan said the Pentagon would prepare two fiscal 2020 spending plans — the originally planned $733 billion request and a lower $700 billion request — so the department wouldn’t “reverse course on all that planning.”

Ultimately, Trump reversed course and endorsed an even higher $750 billion defense budget request for the coming year.

Ties to the arms industry

His defense industry background raised red flags among lawmakers and others concerned about the Trump administration’s reliance on executives from large defense contractors to staff numerous key Pentagon posts.

The late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told Shanahan at his June 2017 confirmation hearing that he was “not overjoyed” with his previous industry work.

“I am concerned that 90 percent of defense spending is in the hands of the five corporations, of which you represent one,” McCain told Shanahan. “I have to have confidence that the fox is not going to be put back into the hen house.”

It’s unclear what timeline the president has for nominating a permanent replacement for Mattis.

But after spending 30 years at Boeing overseeing commercial aircraft lines and several high-profile weapons contracts, Shanahan doesn’t sound like he wants to return anytime soon.

Asked this fall about how he’s made the transition from the corporate world, he remarked: “I tell people it’s like breaking up with your long-time girlfriend and finding the love of your life.”

Bryan Bender and Gregory Hellman contributed to this report.

It’s the “All-I-Want-For-Christmas-is-$5-billion-for-the-wall” shutdown of 2018. Well, actually $2.6 billion. OK, $2 billion. Or the “Please just give us something” shutdown.

The partial government closure that began at midnight Friday is in its second day, and there are no signs the impasse will end soon. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney warned on Sunday the shutdown could drag on into January, when Democrat Nancy Pelosi is expected to take over as speaker of the House.

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President Donald Trump has quietly come down from his original $5 billion demand for a border wall to just $2 billion, according to Republican lawmakers and aides.

Trump has also backed off his demand that Congress approve an actual border wall, instead suggesting a steel picket fence of sorts, the design of which Trump tweeted to widespread disdain.

“Yeah, I don’t think he settles for less than $2 billion for the wall,” said a Republican lawmaker who attended an Oval Office meeting with Trump on Saturday.

Democrats, though, remain at zero money for Trump’s wall. Nil. Nothing. No money for a border wall or steel slats or anything remotely resembling the kind of “beautiful” barrier that Trump wants to build. Democrats are OK with a “fence” or more money for “border security,” but any obstacle that Trump can call a wall is unacceptable.

“Well, what Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have both told the president is, we are not going to build a wall, period,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

All of which means that a government that spends $3.8 trillion annually is being disrupted over 0.005 percent of its annual budget.

In fact, the 2018 Christmas shutdown is starting to look a lot like 2016 — when government funding lapsed for 16 days — or 1995-96, when a partisan showdown between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich lasted 21 days. That’s especially bad news for the 800,000 federal employees who won’t get paid until the shutdown ends, half of whom may also be furloughed.

It’s not even clear who is going to do the negotiating to end the shutdown. No one wants to deal with Trump, who has very little credibility with party leaders on either side of the aisle. And no one is going to sign off on a deal unless Trump publicly declares for his support for any agreement first.

“Everyone has to hold hands on this,” said an aide to one top Democrat. “We’re not doing anything until the president says he will sign it.”

An exasperated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says Trump needs to negotiate directly with Democrats. Instead, Trump met on Saturday with hard-line Republicans — the “Lou Dobbs Caucus,” as a GOP lawmaker dubbed them — who urged him not to back off at all. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) privately told a House Democrat that McConnell should be the one negotiating with Trump. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Pelosi have all headed back home for Christmas, and they’re not negotiating at all.

Those who have spoken to Trump say he’s privately aware that his leverage vastly decreases in 2019, meaning he needs to have the border wall fight now.

Yet Democrats seem stronger with every passing day. While Republicans aren’t going to get the $5 billion Trump wanted, conservatives are unwilling to accept the $1.6 billion for border security that Democrats offered. Trump himself rejected $1.3 billion that was on the brink of passage last week.

“Here’s the problem, of course, is that as recently as two weeks ago, they had offered us $1.6 billion for that same thing, so they’re moving in the wrong direction,” Mulvaney said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Trump is coming off a rough stretch of his presidency.

House Democrats routed Republicans on Election Day, and subpoenas are expected to start flying early next year. Trump’s obsession with special counsel Robert Mueller grows daily. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned over Trump’s decision to pull all U.S. troops out of Syria, and he rebuked the president in an open letter rejecting “Trumpism” as a national security doctrine. Trump retaliated on Sunday by announcing he’s forcing Mattis out by Jan. 1.

The stock market is slumping, and Trump’s attacks on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell have spooked Wall Street. And now the Christmas shutdown — the third shutdown of Trump’s tenure as president — which threatens to drag on for weeks.

The New York Times reported on Saturday that Trump “spends ever more time in front of a television, often retreating to his residence out of concern that he is being watched too closely.” The Nixonian overtones of that image aren’t lost on Democrats.

“He’s not behaving like he’s fit for office. He’s behaving extremely erratically,” said former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro on “Meet the Press.” Castro is considering a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

“I can tell you every day I question whether or not we can endure another two years,” Durbin added. “I think we can; I think this Constitution is strong. The American people are strong. But I’m hoping that my Republican colleagues will step up and join us in a bipartisan effort to put this government back on track.”

For her part, Pelosi is already promising to act quickly when she takes over as speaker on Jan. 3.

“Until President Trump can publicly commit to a bipartisan resolution, there will be no agreement before January when the new House Democratic Majority will swiftly pass legislation to re-open government,” Pelosi said Saturday in a letter to her colleagues.

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.