What The Hell America!

Unemployment rates are near historical lows, and finding good help is hard. Perhaps that’s why Donald Trump keeps turning to the same group of officials to fill multiple positions.

Todd Blanche is the deputy attorney general, the No. 2 official at the Justice Department—a big and important job. As of this week, he’s also the acting Librarian of Congress. Russ Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget, is also the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—though because he’s effectively frozen the bureau’s work, that may not be much of a lift. Kash Patel is the head of the FBI but also served as acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives until he was replaced by Daniel Driscoll, who happens to be the secretary of the Army as well.

Still, no one is working as hard as Marco Rubio, who now has four jobs. His main gig is serving as secretary of state, but in February he was appointed acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Days later, he also became the acting archivist of the United States. And earlier this month, after Trump sacked National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, he named Rubio to fill that role on an acting basis as well. (A State Department spokesperson has said he’s receiving only one salary.) The administration is also relying on acting officials—temporarily appointed but not Senate-confirmed—in other key roles, including FEMA’s head and the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

The government has a term for this: dual-hatting. Or rather, a term exists for what Blanche, Vought, and Patel are doing. Rubio is breaking new ground in both semantics and government. Some dual-hat roles exist by design. The head of the U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency are the same person, to increase agility when dealing with cybersecurity threats, though some people believe that the roles should be split.

In these other cases, however, Trump either can’t or won’t find someone to actually fill the role. Neither possibility is encouraging. If he can’t, at this early stage in his administration, find enough qualified people willing to do these jobs, then the rest of his term will be a continuous struggle to execute. If he simply won’t, because he would rather stick with a small circle of figures he trusts, the administration will also be beset by dysfunction, as leaders pulled in too many directions drop balls, as well as by dangerous incompetence and conflicts of interest.

The dual-hatting reflects Trump’s attempts to learn from his first term. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation document that has been a blueprint for the administration, the authors lamented that Trump was very slow to appoint people to fill administration roles. “This had the effect of permanently hampering the rollout of the new President’s agenda,” they wrote, because “much of the government relied on senior careerists and holdover Obama appointees to carry out the sensitive responsibilities that would otherwise belong to the new President’s appointees.” As Trump’s presidency continued, he came to rely on acting appointments, in part because the Senate declined to confirm some of his less-qualified nominees.

Project 2025 recommended using more acting appointments but, more important, sought to solve this problem by identifying and training a corps of loyal operatives ready to be appointed on day one. That doesn’t seem to have worked so far. Trump has more confirmed picks than at the same point in his first administration and the Joe Biden administration but is just keeping pace with Barack Obama, and he seems to have a particular problem filling positions that are very important but below Cabinet rank.

Whether the dual-hat wearers are qualified to do the work seems to hold little importance for Trump. The White House’s rationale for firing Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was nonsensical: She was accused of acquiring books inappropriate for children, which makes little sense when discussing a non-lending library with a wide collection. She holds a doctorate in library science and served as president of the American Library Association. Blanche, by contrast, has spent his career as a white-shoe lawyer (including defending Trump in his criminal trials).

Rubio’s roles at USAID and as national security adviser at least have some overlap with his work as secretary of state (if not with one another), but they require a broad range of managerial skills and knowledge. As my colleague Tom Nichols recently wrote, “Rubio is the only person besides Henry Kissinger to have ever run the National Security Council and State Department simultaneously, and it is both a criticism and a compliment to say that Marco Rubio is no Henry Kissinger.”

As for the fourth role, it makes no sense except as an attempt to weaken the Archives. “I don’t think it’s possible to have an effective Archives without an archivist,” David Ferriero, the archivist from 2009 to 2022, told me. Ferriero remains in frequent touch with former colleagues, and told me that Rubio had only recently made his first appearance at the National Archives, about 100 days into the administration. That means the Archives are without a full-time leader at a crucial moment.

“The first 100 days are very important,” Ferriero told me, because 4,000 new people typically enter the government in that period. “Those incoming folks need to be trained about what the rules and regulations are regarding recordkeeping. That’s the piece that I know isn’t taking place now. All the former guidelines, principles, and following the rules are out the window. That means a huge hole in our history.”

In an emailed statement, the National Archives and Records Administration said, “The National Archives’ core mission is preserving the records of the United States Government and making those records available to the American people.” The statement cited the recent release of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. The statement did not address how often Rubio has been at work at the Archives.

Rubio might also have an incentive to not preserve records. As secretary of state, he was part of a Signal group discussing strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels, to which Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently added. These discussions are too sensitive to happen over Signal, an off-the-shelf application, but once they did take place, they became subject to public-records laws. How and whether the administration was preserving them remains unclear, though, and they may have been deleted. Is Archivist Marco Rubio likely to raise a fuss about violations of the law committed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio?

Conflicts of interest like this one, as well as cases of simple neglect, will proliferate the longer the administration keeps using the same group to fill many jobs. Trump owes it to his agenda and to the nation to doff the dual hats.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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