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It feels odd that President Donald Trump tapped a housing expert to oversee the American intelligence community.
But Trump is dug in on his temporary appointment of Bill Pulte, the housing official he wants to start next week and shake things up and clean house during a temporary assignment overseeing the intelligence community. Democrats, to protest the hiring move, could let a key foreign surveillance law lapse and Republicans on Capitol Hill are scrambling, according to CNN’s most recent report.
It feels like a similar problem that qualified leaders of both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration were pushed out and have not yet been replaced. The role of surgeon general has not yet been permanently filled during Trump’s second term.
Trump’s power to push nominees for key roles through the Senate is waning as his party braces for an election in November in which his low approval ratings could be a drag on other Republicans.
In a retread of his first administration, Trump seems likely to rely more and more on “acting” heads of certain agencies, at least for as long as the law allows. Meanwhile, he will continue to test the same law — the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 — by giving a few close aides vast responsibility over multiple agencies.
This is not a novel concept in Trump’s administration, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also acting archivist, or where the administrator of the Social Security Administration is doing double duty in the invented position of CEO of the IRS since the director position at the tax collection agency can no longer legally be filled on a temporary basis.
The throughline for Pulte, the soon-to-be “acting” director of national intelligence and Senate-confirmed head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is neither housing nor intelligence, but rather, as CNN reported, his track record of using his federal job to target Trump’s political enemies.
In the Oval Office on June 4, the president made clear that Pulte would not have the job too long: “It’s an acting position, it’s not a permanent,” Trump said.
And, rather than citing a need to coordinate intelligence at a time of war, the president expects that with Pulte in the role, “He may find out some things about the rigged elections.”
“It’s a layer cake of mismanagement,” said Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that lobbies for effective government.
A civil service that has already been cowed by efforts to cut positions and root out what Trump believes is a deep state set against him is also dealing with leaders who have no background in the agencies they are leading.
“It is a recipe for waste, corruption, incompetence, and bad outcome for the American people,” Stier said.
Pulte’s ascendance in particular raises two distinct issues in how Trump has run the US government:
► The first issue is Trump’s use of “acting” officials as a way to end-run, temporarily, the Senate confirmation process, which can be acrimonious and political in the best of circumstances. Every president has done this, but Trump does it much more frequently and openly. In his first term, he talked about liking the “flexibility” avoiding the confirmation process gave him. Never mind that it’s required in the Constitution.
► The second issue is the smushing of unrelated responsibilities into the cadre of trusted Trump aides, which has created multiple odd job combos.
Both issues ultimately run into laws.
The law that set up the DNI role, for instance, requires that anyone nominated “shall have extensive national security expertise.” When the announcement was made, Pulte did not even have a security clearance, although he also has not been nominated for the permanent role. But another part of the law stipulates that if a vacancy occurs, the principal deputy director of national intelligence “shall act for” the DNI during a vacancy. The current principal deputy director of national intelligence is an experienced former CIA officer named Aaron Lukas.
But there’s another law at play here.
The Federal Vacancies Act of 1998 was passed on a bipartisan basis to clip President Bill Clinton’s ability to avoid seeking lawmakers’ blessing for key political appointments that require Senate approval. The Washington shorthand for these jobs is PAS.
The Vacancies Act lays out a somewhat complicated system for filling vacancies. First, it requires that PAS roles only be filled by their top deputies, other top officials in their agency, or another Senate-confirmed official. Pulte is a Senate-confirmed official.
But there are also time limits. An acting official can only serve for 210 days after a vacancy occurs. If the president nominates a permanent replacement, that 210-day clock stops during the nomination process. The president gets another 210-day period for an acting official if the first nomination fails or is withdrawn. But they don’t get a third.
Presidents of both parties have routinely violated this law, according to the Government Accountability Office.
US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was already busy with Trump’s trade war when he was also tasked to lead the Office of Government Ethics, which is supposed to guard against conflicts of interest in the government, and the Office of Special Counsel, which plays an important role aiding government whistleblowers.
Trump doesn’t seem to have much use for either office during his second term. Neither has a permanent leader at the moment.
The Federal Election Commission, which is supposed to be bipartisan, doesn’t currently have enough commissioners to launch investigations.
The US Merit Systems Protection Board, which is tasked with hearing complaints of federal workers, sort of has a quorum, but only because its Senate-approved chairman, Henry Kerner, is also acting vice chairman.
There are about 1,300 Senate-approved positions, according to Stier’s Partnership for Public Service. The group is tracking more than 800 key roles, and more than 270 of those have no nominee from the Trump administration. About 100 roles have a nominee that has not yet been confirmed by the Senate. This is actually a slightly higher confirmation rate for Trump 2.0 than either the Biden administration or the first Trump administration.
But the way Trump is relying on acting officials tests laws that set out how vacancies are supposed to be filled and the spirit of the Constitution, which tried to force compromise between lawmakers and the president by requiring the “advice and consent” of the Senate for top officials in the government.
“This appears to be the primary lesson he learned from his first term, which is choose people who will do whatever he wants, no matter what, as opposed to choosing people who will stand up for the Constitution, the rule of law, and be capable of running these very important, complex organizations that have had huge impact on the American public,” Stier said.
This headline has been updated.
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