Trump’s acting troupe

All this raises a question of a less trivial variety. Does having so many important jobs filled by people who are not permanently in their roles, without buy-in from a Republican-controlled Senate in which Democrats have few remaining tools at their disposal for blocking Trump nominees without at least some GOP support, really help the cause? People with disparate views of the president disagree.

With the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in April, a fifth of the Cabinet-level executive agencies were headed by “acting” Cabinet secretaries stewarding their departments on a temporary basis. The release of Mueller’s report on the Trump-Russia investigation could easily have happened under an acting attorney general were it not for the Senate’s relatively quick confirmation of William Barr, who had previously held the office during George H.W. Bush’s administration. And even Barr’s status as a reliable narrator of Mueller’s findings was challenged by Democrats and some Republicans.

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The Office of Management and Budget is run by a temporary director. So is the Small Business Administration, ever since Linda McMahon resigned to join Trump’s reelection campaign. There is only an acting ambassador to the United Nations following Nikki Haley’s departure. The Federal Aviation Administration, Food and Drug Administration, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Secret Service are but a few sub-Cabinet agencies with acting heads. Even the White House chief of staff, a job that doesn’t require a Senate vote, is held by someone with the acting asterisk next to his title.

“It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that?” Trump told reporters ahead of a Camp David jaunt earlier this year. “I like ‘acting.’ So we have a few that are acting. We have a great, great Cabinet.” He said much the same thing to CBS’ “Face the Nation” a month later. “I like ‘acting’ because I can move so quickly,” the president insisted in February.

The president’s defenders consider the unusually high number of acting Cabinet secretaries a swamp-draining feature, not a flaw. They say it is another blow Trump has struck against the administrative state, on par with his deregulation and willingness to occasionally put unconventional people closer to the levers of power — Ben Carson as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example — and if you don’t like it, Democrats shoulder their share of the blame for slowing the approval of Trump’s nominees.

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Not everyone shares this assessment of Trump’s acting Cabinet, of course. His surprise election win and topsy-turvy transition operation left his team flat-footed and short-staffed from the very beginning. The turnover at upper levels of the administration is unusually high, even by the standards of stress-filled jobs with a significant burnout factor. And even Senate Republicans have balked at some of Trump’s nominees for consequential positions, though the overall track record of Cabinet picks getting through has been good, save the occasional Ronny Jackson hiccup here and there.

Critics of the Trump administration argue that the proliferation of acting secretaries and department heads is a way to circumvent the Senate’s advice and consent power under the Constitution. Some of the placeholders were not even confirmed as deputies. Anyone occupying their jobs temporarily is potentially subject to more pressure from Trump himself. “Senators rightly worried that presidents might use acting appointees to evade oversight and institutional prerogatives,” New York University professor Paul Light told the New York Times. “Yet, we haven’t heard a word from the Senate on the Trump administration’s abuse of its acting authority.”

Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, compared all the acting secretaries and directors to substitute teachers. “They might be amazing educators or amazing leaders in their own right,” he told NPR, “but they’re not set out for success. They’re not going to be perceived as having complete and full authority by those that are around them.”

Some friends of the Trump administration are more pointed. “I used to be a big believer in this practice. The president is known for ‘You’re fired,’ right?” said an operative close to the White House who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly. “I now think it is turning over the bureaucracy to the bureaucracy.”

Trump faced problems early on staffing his administration. His reliance on the talent pool built up by previous Republican presidents, who in some cases had very different views on key policy questions, has led many MAGA loyalists to insist Never Trumpers hold too much power. But there was a brief influx of top-tier GOP talent into the Cabinet, especially once Trump pulled off the win. Jim Mattis signed on as defense secretary. Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos were past Trump critics. Even Mitt Romney interviewed for secretary of state.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao is not only the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, but a conservative darling who has demonstrated staying power in the executive branch in the past. She served all eight years of Bush 43’s presidency as secretary of labor, making her that administration’s longest-tenured Cabinet member.

Trump loyalists were nevertheless left in the position of finding themselves outmaneuvered by old guard Republicans who had more governing experience than veterans of the 2016 campaign, populists energized by the president’s platform, or those close to family members such as Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, a White House senior adviser. It was a situation similar to that which movement conservatives found themselves in when Reagan was elected and many positions had to be filled by Bush supporters instead.

Early in the Trump administration, there were a number of President Barack Obama-appointed holdovers. The most prominent was acting Attorney General Sally Yates, pushed out over her refusal to defend the president’s travel ban targeting some Muslim-majority countries. Yates also was a major player in the ouster of Michael Flynn, raising Logan Act and Russian blackmail concerns about the president’s first national security adviser.

But Trump has struggled to keep in place even ideological allies who were hand-picked for their positions. Attorney General Jeff Sessions was a booster of the Trump immigration agenda before the president himself and helped bring senior adviser Stephen Miller into the fold. Sessions’ recusal from the Russia investigation, leading to the appointment of a special counsel by the deputy attorney general, irrevocably damaged their relationship. Sessions was pushed out after the midterm elections.

There have been repeated rumors that Lee Francis Cissna, also an ally of immigration hard-liners, may be removed from his perch at Citizenship and Immigration Services as the Trump administration continues to clean house at the Department of Homeland Security. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told the Washington Post he was “very, very concerned” about that possibility.

While many who oppose Trump initiatives dislike the increasingly temporary nature of Trump’s Cabinet, some supporters of the president feel the same way. Whatever Trump gains in “flexibility,” they say, he loses in meaningful control of the bureaucrats who are going to outlast even the most settled presidential appointees. An old Reagan hand described acting secretaries as the “tip of the problem,” because “they do not have the time to get to know how their bureaucracy really works.”

There are also genuine fears that acting secretaries lack the institutional support from inside their own departments to implement Trump policies, especially when those plans deviate most from the bipartisan Washington consensus. In December, Trump announced he wanted to withdraw American troops from Syria. He later reiterated his backing of a more gradual drawdown of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the site of America’s longest war. And Trump continued to question the utility of the NATO alliance, especially under its current distribution of defense spending burden-sharing.

All this helped trigger the departure of Mattis, a move that unsettled the nation’s capital because he was among the most respected Cabinet members. “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position,” Mattis wrote in his resignation letter. Whatever was likely to happen in Afghanistan and Syria, Trump was able to accelerate Mattis’ timetable for withdrawal, accepting the end of his tenure earlier than the outgoing Pentagon chief had offered.

Since then, the Department of Defense has been run by an acting secretary, Patrick Shanahan. He might wind up being Mattis’ permanent replacement, but his nomination has been delayed by allegations he had boosted Boeing, a former employer, in his capacity as the temporary guardian of the Pentagon. An investigation by the department’s office of inspector general cleared him of any wrongdoing. “We determined that Mr. Shanahan did not make the alleged comments and did not promote Boeing, or disparage its competitors,” the report states. “While Mr. Shanahan did routinely refer to his prior industry experience in meetings, witnesses interpreted it, and told us, that he was doing it to describe his experience and to improve Government management of DoD programs, rather than to promote Boeing or its products.”

All that is good news for Trump. But it has not translated into any faster withdrawal from Afghanistan or Syria than was likely to take place under Mattis. Instead a more permanent appointee, himself outside the scope of Senate confirmation, has been described in press reports as pushing a different policy with some success. “President Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, rolled back on Sunday Mr. Trump’s decisions to rapidly withdraw from Syria, laying out conditions for a pullout that could leave American forces there for months or even years,” the New York Times reported in January.

Bolton has been a bête noire of the media for many years, thus it is not surprising he is cited by the Gray Lady as an internal obstacle to a Trump policy initiative with bipartisan support — though also opposition; the Senate voted to rebuke precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria in a McConnell-backed resolution supported by all but four of the chamber’s Republicans. The episode still casts doubt on how effectively interim appointees such as Shanahan can impose Trump’s will on a government and national security establishment that has severe misgivings about the president’s directives in these areas.

It’s a political dynamic with which Bolton has some familiarity. He was a recess appointee as ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush because he could not win Senate approval even with a Republican majority. He remained a force in the U.S. delegation and the Bush administration, but the temporary nature of his assignment limited his effectiveness and gave ample fodder to his many detractors.

Trump came into the presidency with less government experience than any commander in chief in decades. Most previous nonpolitical presidents had at least been generals in large-scale wars that the United States won. He also had fewer people who had spent a considerable amount of time in politics who were personally loyal to him. Karl Rove and Valerie Jarrett served Bush and Obama, respectively, long before they were president. Kellyanne Conway began the 2016 election cycle working for a Ted Cruz super PAC, and Roger Stone was too toxic to be part of the official campaign, which did not protect him from Mueller.

A Cabinet of interchangeable, temporary appointees who must dance to the tune Trump sings may be appealing to the president. It gives him the kind of flexibility and authority he lacks when dealing with more secure officials who can draw on the legitimacy that Senate confirmation confers. But if Trump wants to make governing great again, he might be better off if the Cabinet weren’t bare.

W. James Antle III is the editor of the American Conservative.