Trump’s Homeland Security Purge Is Destined to Fail

After ousting Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, President Donald Trump has continued what everyone is calling a “purge” of the department this week. The gist seems to be that Trump is frustrated because he can’t get his way on border and immigration policy and seems to be empowering White House aide Stephen Miller to conduct a broader overhaul.

There’s nothing wrong with a president removing a cabinet secretary or the head of an agency if they differ on policy. At least, it’s perfectly within the president’s authority. But it’s generally a sign of failure: It means that something went wrong in the process of choosing the official, or that the president hasn’t managed to persuade the official to do what he wants. If a president decides to sack a whole department, or much of it … well, that’s a sign of a much bigger failure. It means a whole bunch of nominations went wrong, and that the president can’t get anyone to do what he wants.

Now the really dangerous path is if Trump decides to simply ignore the department and use White House staff such as Miller to implement policy. That’s what Watergate and Iran-Contra had in common: presidents who couldn’t get federal agencies to carry out the policies they wanted and tried to just do it themselves. Both times it was a fiasco. Not only did it backfire and harm the president, but in both cases it failed to achieve the original policy goals. (Yes, Ronald Reagan survived Iran-Contra, but it crippled his presidency. His influence dwindled, his approval ratings collapsed and he was forced to accept a new chief of staff. Nixon, of course, fared even worse.)

Normal presidents listen carefully to what the executive branch is saying, and learn from it. When they realize there’s resistance to something they want, they may decide to back off, to find new allies, or to deploy additional resources. Sometimes they’ll choose to compromise or even accept defeat if it becomes clear that their proposals won’t work. They may also decide that it’s a personnel issue, and put someone more sympathetic in place (although that won’t do much good if they mistake across-the-board opposition for the stubbornness of a lone official).

Any of those options are sometimes appropriate, and have worked for various presidents. But just ignoring the normal policy-making process is almost always the path to failure. We saw that at the very beginning of Trump’s administration, when bypassing the bureaucracy yielded a botched immigration ban. It was a good demonstration of why implementing policy from the White House tends to fail – the president’s staffers didn’t have the expertise to pull off such a fraught and complicated reform.

We’re already seeing pushback from Senate Republicans over the Homeland Security purge. And rightly so. Senate-confirmed nominees answer to both Congress and the president; attempting to bypass the bureaucracy also means bypassing Congress, which can lead to a very angry Congress and antagonize even the president’s normal allies.

All in all? Trump and Miller are heading down a road that has almost always led to failure in the past. Perhaps they can manage to upend the normal incentives and constraints of the U.S. government and achieve policy success this way. But I’d bet heavily against it.

1. Dave Hopkins on Trump’s historic weakness.

2. Zachary Elkins at Mischiefs of Faction on the constitutionally weak U.S. presidency.

3. Dan Drezner is getting worried.

4. Judith Kelley at the Monkey Cage on the U.S. and the International Criminal Court.

5. Rachel M. Cohen speaks with federal employees about surviving Trump.

6. Grace Gedye on Congress and technology.

7. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tobin Harshaw on rethinking nuclear deterrence.

8. And Ed Kilgore on the oldest ex-senator.

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