WASHINGTON — Jamieson Greer has a big job — three of them, actually.
As U.S. trade representative, Greer has been flying around the world at Donald Trump’s behest, negotiating with countries over the tariffs that the president imposed.
On top of that, he is the government’s official watchdog. The White House has appointed Greer both acting director of the Office of Government Ethics and acting head of the Office of Special Counsel.
Cutting trade deals to Trump’s liking is one thing. Holding the Trump administration accountable for ethical lapses is something different. The missions would seem incompatible. Yet Greer’s hybrid role isn’t so much an anomaly in Trump’s second term as a norm.
Trump has taken some Cabinet members and senior administration officials and layered on additional work that calls for wholly different sets of skills.
Daniel Driscoll is secretary of the Army, but also the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The first job is about keeping soldiers in fighting trim; the second includes cracking down on contraband cigarettes.
Marco Rubio is secretary of state, national security adviser and, for good measure, acting head of the National Archives and Records Administration, with its collection of rare documents that include Thomas Edison’s patent application for the light bulb. He is also the acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development — or what’s left of it, anyway, after the Trump administration effectively dismantled it.
Trump recently named Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche the acting head of the Library of Congress. The Justice Department upholds the nation’s laws and advances Trump’s agenda; the library is supposed to give lawmakers independent research they request.
The dual postings give rise to a tangle of managerial challenges, constitutional questions and potential conflicts of interest, critics contend. If a whistleblower comes forward and alleges wrongdoing at Greer’s trade office, can he give the complaint a fair hearing? Is Rubio equipped to forge a peace deal in Ukraine while also ensuring that visitors have a rewarding experience at the Herbert Hoover library in West Branch, Iowa, and the 15 other presidential libraries the Archives runs?
“It is the model of a confused startup operation,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale University’s school of management.
Congressional Democrats have taken note of the appointments and objected to what they describe as an end-run around the Senate’s right to confirm or reject presidential appointments.
Greer was confirmed by the Senate as trade representative, but not as head of the special counsel or ethics offices. Rubio was confirmed as secretary of state, but not as the archivist.
Blanche was confirmed for his Justice Department post, but not as acting librarian. Beyond that, the library’s own rules state that the acting librarian must come from within the institution — a provision that would seem to rule out Blanche. (Indeed, the library disputes that Blanche is now in charge; a library official, Robert Newlen, sent an email to employees last week identifying himself as the acting librarian.)
“It’s the Library of Congress; not the Library of the Attorney General or the Library of the President,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said.
“This is a really offensive defiance of the constitutional role that the Senate has to play,” Blumenthal added. “Putting someone in that role who’s been approved for a different job is a thumb in the eye of the Senate.”
Then there’s the matter of workload. Any one of these jobs can fill 24 hours in a day. Stacking one atop another would appear to strain the limits of human endurance. In an interview last week with CNBC, Greer was asked how much sleep he gets a night.
Four or five hours, he said.
He had just returned from Switzerland where he took part in trade talks with China. Once he was done with his TV interviews for the day, he said he would get on the phone and talk trade with India’s commerce minister. Later in the week, he flew to South Korea for a summit meeting with his overseas trade counterparts.
Asked if Greer has shown up yet at the Office of Special Counsel in Washington, D.C., a spokesman for the office said: “No comment.”
One sign of the enormity of Greer’s portfolio is that he’s off-loaded part of it to an underling. He has tapped another Office of Special Counsel official, Charles Baldis, to act as his designee. Greer consults with Baldis, who is running the office on his behalf, an Office of Special Counsel aide told NBC News.
A spokesperson for the U.S. trade representative did not respond to questions or make Greer available for comment.
“These jobs are difficult for people to do singly,” said Max Stier, founding president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group devoted to improving government performance. “They require absolute and overwhelming commitment to do only one of them, and there’s no way on God’s green Earth someone can do multiples effectively. That has deep problems for decision-making and the capacity of these organizations to do their own work and for the morale of the workforce.”
A White House spokesman defended the president’s managerial practices.
“The president understands that he’s built a team of extremely qualified people that can be dual-hatted and get the job done,” said Harrison Fields, the White House’s principal deputy press secretary.
He added that “the president has incredible amounts of trust and confidence in those that are holding multiple roles, and he appreciates their commitment to his administration and the country.”
“Show me a situation where a ball was dropped,” Fields said. “Show me a situation where the president’s agenda failed. No one can do that. The president has a team of people who are able to walk and chew gum at the same time.”
President Joe Biden’s administration, by contrast, was staffed by “so-called experts that ran our country into the ground,” Fields continued.
An emerging pattern is that Trump wants his most trusted officials in roles that are important to his interests. Consider Rubio.
Earlier this month, Trump took the unusual step of touting Rubio as a potential successor.
“He trusts Marco,” a Trump adviser told NBC News.
The Archives job handed to Rubio would seem a governmental backwater, but it played an important role in the events leading to Trump’s indictment in 2023 over his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home after he left office.
The Archives notified Trump’s attorneys four months after he left office in 2021 that it was missing some of his presidential records, including his correspondence with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
The following year, the Archives’ inspector general sent a referral letter to the Justice Department noting that Trump had retained “highly classified records” after leaving office. Trump repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case last year.
“When he [Trump] returned to the White House in January 2025, he wasted little time in purging NARA’s top leadership to make room for loyal officials more likely to do his bidding — or even to turn a blind eye to future legal violations, including of the Presidential Records Act,” American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group, said in a statement.
Another advantage for Trump in keeping a small circle of the same decision-makers is that it suppresses any challenges to his authority, former officials and good-government groups contend.
“If you give 20 jobs to one person, they’re not going to have time to think independently,” said John Bolton, a former national security adviser who served in Trump’s first term. “They’ll just do what he [Trump] tells them to do.”
Upset as some lawmakers may be, there doesn’t seem to be much they can do to stop Trump from concentrating key jobs in the hands of a few people.
Last month, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and three other Democratic members of Congress sent Greer a letter asking him to resign from his ethics jobs, arguing that he can’t carry them out impartially.
“Dear Ambassador, Acting Special Counsel and Acting Director Greer,” the letter began.
Greer sent a reply, but it didn’t include an agreement to resign or much detail, a Democratic congressional aide told NBC News.
“We’re thinking about next steps,” the aide added.
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