I’ve written here before to emphasize that focusing on unitary executive theory, especially with respect to the Trump regime, without discussing how that executive actually manages, is an incomplete if not silly approach. A century of study of corporate management seems to suggest that “the CEO needs to be able to fire subordinates” is hardly the end of wisdom on the topic. It certainly is not inconsistent with additional propositions, like “the CEO shouldn’t hire bad people for important jobs,” “the CEO shouldn’t keep people in important jobs if he thinks they’re bad at them,” and “before embarking on risky undertakings, the CEO should make sure he has competent and trusted people in place to manage those risks.” A theory that arrives at the very first proposition and then stops is not much of a theory. Unitary executive advocates should be writing a lot more about actual unitary-executive management practice, and a lot less about the most general and abstract elements of the theory.
And so to the news, which features yesterday’s resignation of the director of the National Counterintelligence Center, Joe Kent. Kent resigned loudly, with a letter blaming everyone but the president–well, not everyone, so much; mostly just the Jews– for starting the still-undeclared US-Iran War.
This is not, obviously, a brief for Kent or his views. Outside the far left-far right horseshoe, it did not take long for people to realize that whatever doubts they might harbor about the administration of the war did not magically make Kent any less unpalatable. Despite Kent’s twenty years of service in the military and military intelligence, there are good reasons to think that a guy who “has long had a penchant for conspiracy theories,” engaged in years of flirtation and heavy petting with white nationalists and Christian nationalists, and, oh yeah, says it’s all the Jews’ fault should not have been given a serious office in the first place.
What is more remarkable is that the person responsible for that appointment agrees. Donald J. Trump, who admittedly is a voluble but unreliable source on the management of the executive branch, said yesterday about Kent–one of the top officials responsible for the security of the American people–that “I always thought he was a nice guy but weak on security.” The administration then fed to a receptive Fox News reporter the assertions that Kent–who, you may recall, was a top official responsible for counterterrorism–was “a known leaker,” was “cut out of POTUS intelligence briefings months ago,” and “has not been part of any Iran planning discussions or briefings at all.” This led to a back-and-forth of competing leaks to the same reporter from the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The White House said it had complained about Kent to DNI Tulsi Gabbard “several times before,” but without telling her to fire him; Gabbard’s office said she would have have fired him if asked, but no one did.
I bow to the wisdom of others with more expertise in this area. But my understanding is that traditionally, people you have “always” thought of as “weak on security” are viewed as bad choices for jobs in…security.
Other verities in that field are that it is bad to have no one in a top security job, although it’s also bad to have someone in that job who can’t manage to pass a polygraph. This is the state of affairs at DHS, itself currently a body without a head. Politico has for months followed the saga of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which went on for nine months with an interim chief, who was kept in place despite failing a polygraph and notwithstanding a tenure “so chaotic that it was hampering the agency’s core mission: protecting sensitive government networks from a crush of cyberattacks.”
Kent’s own immediate superior, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has presided over vast cuts to our national intelligence staffing, is of course so distrusted by the White House that she was kept out of the loop on planning for our Venezuelan operation, and had to fly to Georgia and indulge the president’s fondness for election conspiracies in an attempt to get back into his good graces. Not to speak of preadolescent sneaker enthusiast Kash Patel’s decision to fire a dozen members of the FBI’s counterintelligence team specifically tasked with monitoring threats from Iran, just days before the non-declaration of the US-Iran War. Presumably those electronic threats will now be countered by the FBI’s cool new UFC fighting moves. These are just a few examples of a security landscape marked by a host of risible appointments and “administration cuts at agencies handling counterterrorism.”
Kent’s is thus not just a simple good-riddance tale of the departure of a conspiracist official, of whom the current regime has no shortage. He is representative of a general staffing policy with respect to, inter alia, counterterrorism and cybersecurity: Get rid of a vast number of responsible officers, but make sure to appoint and retain, almost indefinitely, people you have “always” thought” are “weak on security.” Again, I leave it to the experts to opine on whether this is an approved strategy.
I don’t know whether Kent’s appointment was, in an immediate sense, Gabbard’s choice or Trump’s. The fact that he was serving under Gabbard makes it convenient for the White House now to effectively take a “what was she thinking” line on his tenure. And of course no president, whether their administration advocates a unitary executive or not, is intimately and immediately involved in every staffing decision, which necessarily involves plenty of delegation and political give and take. But what the unitary executive line helpfully makes clear is that all of these decisions–to appoint, to retain, to dismiss-are all ultimately the president’s. Joe Biden probably didn’t have a lot to do personally with hiring this person, but he rightly bore the brunt of political responsibility for that choice nonetheless. (In fairness, that oddball, Sam Brinton, was actually fired for being a thief–unlike, say, Tom Homan, another official tasked with domestic security in the current regime.) And the theory suggests that a chief executive who keeps in place a top security official who is “weak on security” either doesn’t much care about managing his own branch or doesn’t much care about counterterrorism and other key elements of domestic security. Which is it? Well, when asked why Trump would put someone he thought of as “weak on security” in a top security position, his press secretary replied, “The president gave Joe Kent a chance,” and repeated the “good guy” line, as if we’re currently holding eight-month tryouts for leading counterterrorism appointments. I think it’s safe to say the answer is: It’s both.
I would think that for unitary executive theorists, yesterday’s story, along with the others mentioned above, presents a windfall of opportunities for study and commentary. The least interesting question facing them will be whether Trump had the power to get rid of Kent. The interesting questions will be why he hired him, or Gabbard, or Patel or Noem or Miller, or a Defense Secretary colorfully described a few days ago as a “Brylcreem-addicted grandstanding dipsomaniac peacock”; why, despite all the creepy tweets about the sacred trust of keeping the Heimat safe written by the 19-year-old white nationalists who run the government’s social media feeds, he keeps these security officials in place even when he thinks they’re bad at their jobs; why he or his subordinates denude the government of people who are good at those jobs, despite the obvious importance of those tasks in a nation that goes to war every few minutes; and how, despite trumpeting the concept and importance of a unitary executive, he can keep discussing these choices as if they have nothing to do with him.