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Last week, the White House announced the withdrawal of Lance Schroyer, President Trump’s nominee to direct Immigration and Customs Enforcement. No explanation was offered, though Schroyer, a former Oklahoma state trooper and a confidant of Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, had been criticized for lack of experience in immigration and in leading large organizations.
In some ways, a vacancy atop ICE is normal: The agency hasn’t had a Senate-confirmed leader since the day Trump took office in 2017. But the lack of a permanent director is especially notable right now because of the emphasis Trump has put on immigration and the major operations ICE has undertaken during his second term.
In the absence of a director, leadership has been split between an acting director, the so-called border czar Tom Homan, the secretary, and the Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller; the administration’s tactics have been volatile, changing often and abruptly. Among many other scandals, ICE agents keep shooting people, some of them American citizens. The department has struggled to recruit and train qualified agents to conduct the mass deportations Trump wants. The vacuum at the top has allowed loose cannons such as the Border Patrol officer Gregory Bovino to (temporarily) seize huge authority. Probably no director could calm all of these problems, but the lack of a Senate-confirmed leader cannot help instill discipline and organization.
This is not an isolated case. Trump has stridently attacked what he calls the “deep state,” the corps of permanent civil servants whom the president and some of his aides believe are either layabouts or liberal saboteurs, who, regardless, are determined to bog down his agenda. Using this dubious claim as a basis, the administration has struck serious blows against the civil service. Hundreds of thousands of employees have been fired or pushed out, protections have been eliminated, and there are plans to convert many positions into political appointments.
Yet layered above the supposed deep state is what we might call the shallow state: the class of employees who are appointed by each new administration, some subject to Senate confirmation and others not. By intention or negligence, Trump has also left the shallow state riddled with vacancies. The Partnership for Public Service tracks 823 top appointed roles and finds that Trump hasn’t even nominated people for 244 of them. Some of the most notable vacancies are for jobs that would have a central role in implementing Trump’s priorities.
The most glaring case is the Pentagon. The United States is currently sinking deeper into a war with Iran. The president cannot consistently define objectives; no one can explain how or when the war might end, with or without U.S. victory, and the global economy is trembling. But the Defense Department is dealing with this growing crisis with many major jobs open. The department has no secretary of the Army, since Dan Driscoll resigned after feuding with Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Army also has no chief of staff, its top position, after Hegseth forced out General Randy George; senators of both parties are skeptical of Christopher LaNeve, whom Hegseth wants to replace George. Hegseth has ordered a 20 percent reduction in the number of four-star positions, so that allotted positions are left open. The U.S. reportedly faces a serious shortage of munitions, which will take years to fix, but Trump has no assistant secretary for acquisition and no nominee for the role.
The rest of the national-security and foreign-policy apparatus is also understaffed. The National Counterterrorism Center, which coordinates federal-government efforts to fight terror, has had no director since Joe Kent resigned in protest of the Iran war (not that Kent, a conspiracy theorist with fringe views, was a wise choice to lead NCTC in the first place). Despite being embroiled in a war in the Persian Gulf, the U.S. has no ambassadors to the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, or Iraq; it also doesn’t have an ambassador in Yemen, where a rebel group has grabbed some control over another waterway. The U.S. is treating Venezuela as a de facto colony but has no ambassador in Caracas. The president wants to end the war in Ukraine, but he has not sent an ambassador to either Kyiv or Moscow, preferring to rely on the envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law.
To be sure, some of the vacancies in the executive branch are a result of Trump’s desire to eliminate or hamstring bodies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Education, and the Federal Election Commission. But plenty of other posts remain unfilled despite their jobs being directly connected to top Trump priorities. Since Todd Blanche was promoted to attorney general, leading the conversion of the Justice Department into a political weapon, Trump has not named a replacement to serve as deputy attorney general. He has proposed major changes to the 2030 census, but the Census Bureau does not have a director. Likewise, he wants to reorganize the National Park Service, but no one has been nominated to lead it. The administration is wrestling with serious water shortages in western reservoirs, but since it withdrew its nominee to head the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees dams, a year ago, no new commissioner has been named.
The Trump administration is, I have written, pushing a kind of big-government conservatism. Trump’s agenda seeks to wield the power of the state more aggressively and intrusively than any other Republican presidency in memory. Some of those efforts have been chillingly effective, but Trump’s undermining of both the shallow and the deep states means that his government struggles to execute even on his most cherished initiatives. That’s bad news for Trump’s agenda, but it might be good news for democracy.
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- Egypt’s warning to Israel
- The Republicans are bolting from Trump.
- Tom Nichols: Trump should stop hosting summits.
- Quinta Jurecic on the two-year temper tantrum to come
Today’s News
- The Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to deploy an expanded federal database that states can use to check voters’ citizenship status ahead of the midterm elections. The unsigned emergency ruling lifted a lower-court block on the system; there was no vote count but the court’s three liberal justices dissented.
- Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded his three-day U.S. visit today after meeting with President Trump at the White House and visiting the National Archives. Trump said that the two leaders had discussed Iran and that the two will meet in China at an upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
- A multiday nor’easter is expected to bring heavy rain, strong winds, and coastal flooding to the Northeast through the weekend. Coastal flood alerts are in effect for 33 million people from Virginia to Rhode Island, with some areas forecast to receive up to six inches of rain and wind gusts reaching 65 miles an hour.
Dispatches
- The Books Briefing: Tayla Zax explores what Annie Dillard left out.
- Work in Progress: If the people building AI really think that their product could bring about human extinction, how exactly do they think that would work? Rogé Karma spoke with experts about the different hypotheticals.
Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
The Americans Having the Most Sex
By Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey
In the popular imagination, religious faith and a thriving sex life don’t tend to go together. Movies, books, and TV shows depict religious couples as sexually inhibited or dysfunctional. For example, in Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel, Yesteryear—soon to be a movie starring Anne Hathaway—a Scripture-quoting tradwife puts up a good front for Instagram but is privately miserable with her husband, who not only is passive but also struggles to perform in the bedroom.
But the data tell a different story.
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- Trump’s public service announcement: “Love me.”
Culture Break
Explore. Olga Khazan explains an underappreciated problem with dating apps.
Reflect. Ed Sheeran and Macklemore have offered a perfect test case for the debate about whether popular music is expected to change the world or distract from it, Spencer Kornhaber writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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The post Trump’s War on the Shallow State appeared first on The Atlantic.
