Why This Administration Can’t Fill Its Jobs

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The best line of Donald Trump’s three-hour-plus Cabinet meeting last week came not from the president but from Marco Rubio.

“Personally, this is the most meaningful Labor Day of my life, as someone who has four jobs,” said Rubio, who was serving as secretary of state, acting national security adviser, acting archivist of the United States, and acting administrator of USAID. (He’s since handed the latter to Russell Vought, who now also has three titles.) Three of these roles are subject to Senate confirmation; Rubio has been confirmed, and for that matter nominated, only as secretary of state. Trump has not put any nominee forward for the other two positions.

From top roles on down, the Trump administration continues to struggle to find people who can and will fill jobs, leaving the president to rely on a small circle of advisers, each playing multiple roles. The result is short-staffing and conflicts of interest that help explain why the executive branch has been bad at accomplishing not only its statutory responsibilities but also some of its political goals.

Consider Stephen Miran, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Trump has nominated him to fill a recently vacated seat on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Miran told senators during a hearing yesterday that if he is confirmed, he will not resign from the CEA.

“I have received advice from counsel that what is required is an unpaid leave of absence from the Council of Economic Advisers,” Miran said. “And so, considering the term for which I’m being nominated is a little bit more than four months, that is what I will be taking.” (Miran said that if confirmed to a full term, he would resign.)

In other words, Miran would be simultaneously serving (albeit without pay) a president who has demanded that the Fed lower interest rates and sitting on the ostensibly independent board that sets interest rates. Conflicts of interest aren’t usually quite so obvious. The claim that an attorney advised Miran that his approach is fine is not encouraging: This administration seems to be able to get a lawyer to sign off on practically any arrangement. That doesn’t mean the public should accept it. But don’t worry—Miran demurred when a senator asked if he was Trump’s “puppet.”

Somehow, this is not the most disturbing case. Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal lawyer and a top Justice Department official, was narrowly confirmed as a federal appeals judge in July. But between that vote and taking his spot on the bench, Bove continued to work at the Justice Department, reportedly attending both internal meetings and a public event—a highly unusual arrangement. Once again, this didn’t appear to be an explicit violation of the judiciary’s rules, because he hadn’t yet been sworn in; nevertheless, he risked working on issues that could come before him in court. It doesn’t take a law degree to see why this arrangement looks bad, especially at a moment when faith in the courts as a check on the executive branch is in question.

“Socializing with Trump is fine. Advising Trump is not fine. Putting himself physically in a place where it looks like he is identifying with the president’s political agenda is not fine,” the legal ethicist Stephen Gillers told The New York Times. Then again, Bove has never seemed all that concerned about appearing to be anything other than a Trump sycophant. During his confirmation process, he refused to say whether a third presidential term was permitted, despite the clear language of the Constitution, and accounts from several whistleblowers contradict statements he made in his confirmation hearing, which suggests that he may have lied to senators. (He denies this.)

I first wrote about Trump’s use of dual-hatting, which is the term for one person filling multiple jobs, back in May. At the time, the possibility existed that this was a temporary state of affairs. Now it’s starting to look more permanent. Despite a focus on identifying qualified nominees, a key point in Project 2025, Trump’s pace of confirmations for top jobs is roughly the same as it was in his first, shambolic term. This comes even though Republicans control the Senate and have not voted down any nominees. Democrats have tried to slow down various appointments, and the GOP is considering the “nuclear option” to circumvent Democrats’ efforts, but they can’t confirm someone who hasn’t even been nominated, as is the case for nearly 300 roles.

Jobs that don’t have a person devoted to the work full-time are bad for effective governing. For example, the Department of Homeland Security recently told the nonprofit watchdog American Oversight that since early April, it has not been saving text messages exchanged by top officials, as required by law. (DHS later told the Times that it does preserve texts but did not explain why it had previously denied American Oversight’s requests for them.) Responsibility for collecting public records and enforcing laws falls on the National Archives, which Rubio now runs, but he seems unlikely to crack down on DHS, even if he had the time to concentrate on the matter.

An ideological case for failing to appoint individuals for each opening is more plausible: Traditional conservatives who prefer that government do less might cheer this. But as I wrote last week, Trump is attempting to establish an extremely intrusive government that flexes its muscles in nearly every area of American life. That’s hard to do with a skeleton crew, and it sometimes means staffers trying to do things that they don’t really have the authority to do.

Or, in other cases, the expertise. This week, the Department of, uh, War reportedly approved plans to detail as many as 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges. A shortage of immigration judges is a real problem that has dogged the U.S. government for years. A person who comes to the United States and requests asylum may wait for years before they receive a hearing or an interview. Some of those people will be accepted, but some will not, and the prospect of spending years in the U.S. while waiting is understandably attractive for migrants.

That doesn’t mean military lawyers are a good solution, and not simply because the Pentagon seems to have its hands full of tricky legal situations, including the soft launch of martial law in American cities and what look like extrajudicial murders of suspected drug smugglers (the administration has said that it acted lawfully, but it hasn’t offered a detailed explanation). Immigration law is notoriously complex. Bringing in military lawyers “makes as much sense as having a cardiologist do a hip replacement,” Ben Johnson, the head of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Associated Press.

This is the latest instance of Trump turning to the armed forces to do things for which they aren’t trained or prepared. A militarized society isn’t merely a threat to the Constitution and freedom; it’s also unlikely to work very well. Nor is a Federal Reserve that’s a subsidiary of the White House, or a federal bench that is a wing of the Department of Justice, which itself appears to be an appendage of Trump’s personal legal team. These moves have the same ultimate effect as Trump’s efforts to steamroll the judiciary and seize powers from Congress: They create a president who is worse-informed, worse-advised, and ever more powerful.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War, reviving the agency’s pre-1947 title.
A new report from The New York Times details how a team of Navy SEALs in 2019 killed unarmed North Koreans on a secret mission approved by Trump to plant an electronic device to intercept communications of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un.
Federal agents detained 475 workers, most of them South Korean nationals, in what an official said was the largest-ever Department of Homeland Security enforcement operation on a single site, at a Hyundai facility in Georgia.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: When the novelist Lauren Grodstein visited Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2023, the protests she witnessed made her think differently about perseverance, Boris Kachka writes.

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Evening Read

An image of sorority girls running with their Greek letters on bid day. — A+E Global Media

What It Costs to Be a Sorority Girl

By Annie Joy Williams

“There are three important things in a mother’s life—the birth of her child, her daughter’s wedding day, and sorority rush,” Bill Alverson, a sorority-rush coach and the star of the Lifetime show A Sorority Mom’s Guide to Rush, likes to say. Lately, rush is bigger and more competitive than ever, driven by a boom in TikTok content detailing the process. Coaches like Alverson have begun offering their services to girls—and their mothers—desperate to get a bid from elite sororities, and these services don’t come cheap.

Read the full article.