Alex Brandon/AP Photo
From left to right, Jason Miller, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, Boris Epshteyn, Natalie Harp, and Dan Scavino walk off President-elect Donald Trump’s plane as he arrives at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, November 13, 2024.
At the center of government in Palm Beach, Florida, plans are being hastily made for the next four years. Those of us outside the Mar-a-Lago walls have a framework for assessing these plans, one summed up in three little words: Personnel is policy. And so we scour the lists of cabinet announcements and read the tea leaves on the various contenders.
I think that is the wrong way to look at things this time.
Cabinet members have a degree of importance, I guess. Marco Rubio will be in charge of at least something at the State Department, along with Kristi Noem at Homeland Security, and Lee Zeldin at the Environmental Protection Agency. There are suggestions for many more such appointments. Trump made a brief push for getting all his nominees installed rapidly through recess appointments, but with Rick Scott’s MAGA Hail Mary smacked down in the Senate GOP leadership elections, that appears to have backfired. (I don’t think the entire cabinet wants to be unpaid, either.)
But while these cabinet officials will attend meetings and nod their heads at whatever Trump says, the early indications strongly suggest they won’t be setting policy. That will be reserved for the czars, the internal White House appointees that Trump has made in parallel, and who are key to the emerging vision of centralizing power under the president-elect’s thumb.
This development is as funny as it is maddening. A good chunk of conservative media was obsessed with Barack Obama’s “czars,” White House advisers who in the conspiratorial retelling were usurping the Constitution and amassing unearned authority to carry out the president’s bidding. Most of them were in coordinating roles for things like the stimulus program or the bank bailout.
I doubt that the same house organs will see much wrong with Trump’s czars this time around. But it’s clear that’s where the action will be in this incoming administration.
You can start with the border czars. Technically speaking, there’s only one: Tom Homan, the former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who has been formally tapped to carry out Trump’s mass deportation program. But Stephen Miller, named deputy chief of staff for policy and a Homeland Security adviser, will obviously also be part of this effort. Whatever Kristi Noem thinks about border security is irrelevant; Miller and Homan are going to plan and execute the forced removal of potentially millions of undocumented people across the country.
These are the same people, incidentally, who carried out exceedingly unpopular family separations in the first Trump term. Homan has vowed to enter all parts of the country to eject immigrants, setting up confrontations in, and with, blue states and cities. Much of the next couple years will be about Homan and Miller’s blueprints. And neither requires Senate confirmation; Homan wasn’t confirmed as ICE director anyway.
All these loyalists have pretensions of power and big egos that are going to get in each other’s way.
Zeldin, who was not on any energy- or environment-related committee when he served four terms in the House of Representatives (though he was part of the Climate Solutions Caucus, a doomed bipartisan climate change effort), is unlikely to be the point person on energy issues during Trump’s term. That will fall to a new version of Dick Cheney’s White House Energy Task Force, which held secret meetings and gave oil executives exclusive access. Trump, who promised oil executives whatever they wanted as long as they funded his campaign, will hire an energy czar in charge of deregulation and advanced fossil fuel extraction.
Cheney’s fingerprints are also seen on Trump’s new national security adviser, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL), a Cheney staffer on counterterrorism issues in the Bush White House, as well as an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld. Trump supporters expecting the new-old president to break with the neoconservative consensus have to see this as a worst-case scenario. Waltz has been hawkish on Iran in particular, opposed leaving Afghanistan, and thinks Ukraine needs more U.S. weaponry. There’s a school of thought that Waltz and his allies (including Rubio, and defense secretary nominee and Fox News host Pete Hegseth) are more “America First” now, shaded toward isolationism and focused on countering China. (China is, er, not afraid.) Tulsi Gabbard, who joins as director of national intelligence, certainly represents an anti-neocon worldview. But broadly speaking, there’s little distance between the credentials of Trump’s national-security team and those of anyone who would have come in for any other Republican administration. Expect some bombs to drop.
Some warm bodies will be summoned for top cabinet positions on trade, commerce, and the economy. In a bit of hubris that almost sounds like a joke, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, who spent most of his career at none other than avatar of liberal globalism Soros Fund Management, is the rumored choice for Treasury. But it looks like former U.S. Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer will control these areas from the White House, where he will have free rein over tariff policy and other pieces of the economic agenda. (In 2019, Bob Kuttner called Lighthizer “Trump’s One Good Appointee.”)
The final czars are well known. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has plans to fire the bulk of the National Institutes of Health, enact vaccine-skeptical and anti-fluoridation policies, and overhaul nutrition departments at the Food and Drug Administration. I think most people would say there’s room for better public health in America, and in the same breath they’d say RFK Jr. is not the most stable person to get us there.
The most ubiquitous czar, of course, is Elon Musk, poised to co-lead a Department of Government Efficiency (I’m not putting the initials) with Vivek Ramaswamy. It’s a kind of advisory board that sounds a bit like Al Gore’s “reinventing government” initiative in the 1990s. It’s just a recommendation engine; there is no such department, and a formal one would have to be established by Congress. By doing it informally through a White House advisory group, Musk can try to circumvent any conflict-of-interest statutes that should arise given his role as a major government contractor.
These kinds of efficiency panels typically fail to generate much but press releases. (Trump wants to bring back impoundment to enact these cuts without Congressional approval.) But I think it poses a larger problem with government-by-czar. All these loyalists have pretensions of power and big egos that are going to get in each other’s way. Not to mention the fact that any overshadowing of the big boss will be frowned upon. Musk already appears to be wearing out his welcome.
In addition, a lot of these czars are retreads, back from a first term that was historically unpopular with the American people. If they weren’t there then, they’re just unpopular all on their own, or they have ideologies that conflict with what Trump ran on and what the MAGA movement believes it stands for. While there’s been a priority on loyalty, that’s a one-way street with Trump, and will go out the window when the negative reactions come rolling in.
Finally, we’re going to see an orgy of self-enrichment. Trump’s chief of staff is a lobbyist, and his new top adviser is a self-interested contractor and the richest man in the world. Potemkin cabinet members locked out of the real decision-making will not have much to do other than feather their nests.
Some cabinet selections will matter more than others, of course; Matt Gaetz as attorney general will likely operate in czar-like fashion to weaponize the legal system against Trumpian enemies. His previous support for the ban on noncompete agreements and role as a “Khanservative” will undoubtedly take a back seat to this quest for vengeance. (Most Republican House members are glad to be rid of him.)
But a cabinet department, even staffed by a loyalist, is too risky for Trump. He wants everything happening inside the White House, at remove from career bureaucrats or the media. The first Trump administration was chaotic and dysfunctional; this one will look far more autocratic, though perhaps not all that much more competent.
