Donald Trump has made no secret of his destructive plans for a second term, from pardoning federal criminals involved in the January 6 attack on the Capitol to slapping 20 to 60 percent tariffs on every product imported into the country from abroad. A restored Trump presidency offers no shortage of economic and authoritarian nightmares for the American people.
Yet the most damaging proposal, laundered through far-right groups such as the Heritage Foundation (which Trump has publicly disavowed), has garnered relatively few headlines: to undermine the Senate’s role in confirming White House Cabinet officials.
Worse still, there’s little Congress can do to stop Trump from forcing this autocratic new policy into action.
Freed from the moderating influence of Senate confirmation hearings, Trump would be able to quickly appoint all manner of extremists to fill critical roles in an “acting” capacity — and dump any acting official who refuses to carry out potentially illegal orders. The result would be a runaway presidency unchained from accountability and federal executive branch officials beholden only to Trump.
It’s also a far more likely outcome than most pundits seem to think.
None of what is to come is unprecedented. When high-level Trump officials including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and multiple national security officials resigned from his administration in disgust following the violence of January 6, Trump quickly replaced them with acting officials. He then pressured those officials to pledge loyalty to him over their oaths to the Constitution. Thankfully, most of those officials refused.
That was certainly the case for Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who testified that Trump directly pressured him to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Many acting officials found the courage to resist Trump in large part because his presidency was nearly at its end, and it was clear that a peaceful transfer of power would take place. The next generation of acting leaders will need to deal with a Trump, fresh from a 2024 election win, unchallenged within his party and with four long years ahead.
When acting officials failed to give Trump the answers he wanted, the then-president had no problem showing them the door. Trump fired acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire after Maguire dared to tell Congress about Russia’s interests in the Trump administration. Maguire was replaced by die-hard loyalist Richard Grenell, who is now considered a front-runner for an intelligence post in a second Trump administration.
It isn’t just that Trump’s first term set a record for the number of days worked by unconfirmed acting officials; itis that the holes Trump filled that also merit real concern from the country’s national security experts. Acting officials led the Department of Homeland Security for more than a combined year. The Defense Department saw acting leadership at the helm for over 200 days. The Washington Post in 2020 referred to Trump’s first term as a “government full of temps.”
Keeping senior leadership off-balance is a key characteristic of authoritarian leaders. Much like the Soviets, the Trump administration thrived on ensuring no one felt safe in their jobs — and firing them on a moment’s notice as soon as a more loyal voice emerged from Trump’s inner circle. Now many of those acting officials have found cushy jobs developing Republicans’ odious Project 2025, and their love of administrative chaos is now immortalized in ink.
Project 2025 officially recommends liberally invoking the Vacancies Act to fill Senate-confirmed roles with loyalist acting officials from the first day of Trump’s presidency. The result will be an administration where loyalty to Trump is the first and only concern, and where turnover will be even higher than the record level of personnel loss Trump saw in his first term.
But that’s just fine for Trump — his goal has never been good government. Loyalty has always been paramount to him.
Unlike some of Trump’s zanier authoritarian dreams, stuffing his administration with acting loyalists doesn’t require Congress to pass any legislation, nor does it face judicial review from the federal courts.
Lawmakers never anticipated a president taking advantage of the Vacancies Act to the level Trump is likely to, and so there are no safeguards to protect the White House from becoming just another Trump influence-peddling operation. That would be disastrous not only for our democracy but for the core functioning of America’s most critical Cabinet offices.
This plan is an acute threat, but one that lacks the sparkle of a possible federal ban on abortion or Trump’s recent musing about exempting the military from the income tax. If the American people re-elect Donald Trump in November, the chaos of the former president’s final weeks in office will become the roadmap for his entire second term.
We must choose between the Constitution and a second Trump administration. Republicans have made clear we cannot have both.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.