‘Acting’ Out

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, June 02, 2026

 

The most notorious interim appointment of the president’s first term was one that didn’t happen. Or did happen—but only briefly, before being hastily rescinded.

 

To this day, it isn’t clear.

 

Three days before the insurrection in 2021, desperate to find allies within his government who would help him cling to power, a paranoid Donald Trump came this close to naming “rigged election” crank Jeffrey Clark acting attorney general. Years later, Clark and his lawyer would claim that the president actually did make the appointment but changed his mind within a few hours when White House and Justice Department officials threatened to resign en masse if Clark remained in the position.

 

The fact that no one can say definitively, even now, who was in charge of the DOJ during a Trump-made national crisis was a clue to all sentient beings that reelecting him would cause a civic catastrophe. Fortunately for the president, most American voters aren’t sentient.

 

Clark’s quasi-appointment may have been infamous, but it wasn’t unusual. On the contrary: During his first four years in office, Trump acquired a real taste for filling agency vacancies with interim appointees. In mid-2019, slightly more than halfway through his term, his administration was already responsible for more than a quarter of all “acting” Cabinet officials dating back to Jimmy Carter’s presidency. By February 2020, “acting officials in charge of top agencies and departments … accounted for one out of every nine days in those positions,” more than the total number of days served by interim officers across eight years of the Obama administration.

 

That wasn’t an accident. “I sort of like ‘acting,’” the president told reporters in January 2019. “It gives me more flexibility; do you understand that? I like ‘acting.’”

 

He liked “acting” so much that, true to form, he frequently ignored procedural niceties in conniving to install his preferred candidates in acting roles. If you can bear to read two columns by me in one day, revisit this 2022 piece and acquaint yourself with the legal drama involving Matt Whitaker, Kevin McAleenan, William Perry Pendley, and Ken Cuccinelli. One analysis published in 2020 found that no fewer than 16 acting Trump officials were serving beyond the statutory time limit for interim service set by federal law.

 

Four years later, his preference for acting officers was as strong as ever. Within a week of being reelected in 2024, he was encouraging Senate Republicans to adjourn in January and let him fill his Cabinet with recess appointees instead of holding confirmation hearings. Despite the fact that his own party would control the upper chamber and that the filibuster no longer applied to executive nominees, he still craved the power to staff up with whomever he liked without the consent of a friendly Senate.

 

His appetite for interim appointees is quietly one of Trump’s most authoritarian traits. It’s not just a matter of him resenting the need to seek approval from another branch of government; it’s a matter of him wanting to fill key positions with blatantly unfit toadies who answer only to him, and who would never survive quality-control vetting by the Senate.

 

Acting appointments are a useful tool when building a kakistocracy, and so Trump was destined to make use of them aggressively—again. Especially as he sinks deeper into the “YOLO phase” of his presidency.

 

Which is how we ended up this morning with Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence.

 

Mediocrity.

 

Last month the New York Times reported on new research into how Argentina’s authoritarian government recruited so many willing accomplices within the state bureaucracy during the 1970s and 1980s. The conclusion: “Frustrated and mediocre” workers are easy pickings.

 

“It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere—the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion—can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms, and even basic morality,” the paper noted. Accomplices “are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.”

 

The banality of evil, one might call it. I thought of Jeffrey Clark when I read the piece, remembering that he was a nebbishy no-name environmental lawyer at the DOJ before nearly riding his “rigged election” devotion to fascist stardom. But it applies to Bill Pulte, too.

 

Sort of. Pulte isn’t exactly a “middling worker”: He’s the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the head of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, having appointed himself to the latter two positions. Before joining the government, he was a big shot at an investment firm and the grandson of a much, much bigger big shot in the home-construction industry.

 

But he shares two traits with the Argentine paper-pushers. He is, very charitably, mediocre at his job. And he’s very, very eager to get a better one by doing anything that the man in charge asks of him.

 

Pulte’s primary job at FHFA appears to be sifting through mortgage documents filed by the president’s political enemies in hopes of finding an error that would create a pretext to prosecute them. He’s looked into paperwork filed by Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff, New York state  Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, knowing that the conviction and imprisonment of any one of them will endear him to the president forever.

 

He’s 0 for 3. Two separate indictments of James ended up being tossed out of court; undaunted, Pulte filed two new criminal referrals against her with the DOJ in March, alleging homeowner’s insurance fraud. He also filed a criminal referral against Cook, which was all the excuse Trump needed to try to fire her and create a vacancy on the Fed board for one of his own appointees. Cook was never charged with a crime, however, and is challenging the firing on constitutional grounds. Pulte has been reduced to assuring the Fox News faithful that she’ll be indicted eventually, although how he can know that isn’t clear.

 

As for Schiff, not only has he not been charged with anything, even the famously corrupt Trump DOJ appears to be uncomfortable with Pulte’s role in investigating him.

 

If all of that wasn’t embarrassing enough, Pulte was reportedly the genius who convinced the president to promote the idea of a 50-year mortgage, a concept so idiotic that MAGA influencers joined in dunking on it online. “Bill Pulte doesn’t know the first f—ing thing about how the mortgage markets operate,” a source close to Trump complained to Politico at the time. “After publicly humiliating the president with his moronic 50-year mortgage plan it’s safe to assume that his days are numbered.”

 

His days were not numbered.

 

As of today he’s officially Tulsi Gabbard’s replacement as director of national intelligence—in an acting capacity, of course, the way the president likes. Stupid, servile, fiercely committed to persecuting enemies of the regime: A mediocrity like Bill Pulte was a prime candidate for a major promotion in this sort of government, and he finally got it. The fact that he has no background in national security or espionage is icing on the cake.

 

Politically and legally, it makes all the sense in the world.

 

‘Acting’ the part.

 

Pulte was confirmed by the Senate to lead the FHFA. That’s important.

 

It’s important because, under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, the default choice to fill a vacant position in an acting capacity is the “first assistant” (i.e., the deputy director or highest-ranking undersecretary). But there’s an exception: Any Senate-confirmed officer serving anywhere in the government can fill the position temporarily instead if the president desires.

 

You can understand why Congress wrote the law that way. Naively, lawmakers assumed that anyone nominated for a powerful position and confirmed by the Senate would necessarily have the competence and integrity to serve in another powerful position briefly, while a permanent appointee is chosen.

 

That the president might nominate henchmen and that a compliant Senate might rubber-stamp them seems not to have occurred to them—but it did occur to law professor Jack Goldsmith, who warned in 2024 that Trump would game the vacancy process in this way. The fact that Senate-confirmed appointees are legally permitted to play musical chairs in filling vacancies under the FVRA “raises the stakes for every Trump appointment before the Senate,” he wrote.

 

Confirming Bill Pulte—or Todd Blanche or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel—to any position effectively meant confirming them to every position, at least on a temporary basis. No matter: Every Senate Republican voted yes on Pulte’s nomination to the FHFA anyway.

 

And when I say “temporary basis,” I’m speaking very loosely.

 

As noted earlier, the president was in no hurry during his first term to replace acting appointees with Senate-confirmed replacements, often keeping them on beyond the period specified by statute. But even if he were a stickler for the law (giggle), the FVRA is remarkably generous in extending the time that interim officials can potentially serve. It permits an acting director to remain in the job for up to 210 days, then for an additional 210 days if a nominee to replace him is rejected by the Senate, and then for another 210 days if a second nominee is rejected.

 

In other words, Bill Pulte can lawfully hold the position of director of national intelligence for the rest of this year—and then for all of next year, provided that Trump is willing to nominate two unconfirmable putzes in succession to replace him. Here again, the authors of the FVRA were naive in their assumptions, believing that a president would feel obliged to quickly submit a capable permanent nominee to the Senate rather than let an unqualified placeholder linger in the position indefinitely.

 

They didn’t anticipate an autocratic executive who “likes ‘acting.’” And so here we are in June 2026, with an acting attorney general who seems downright eager to commit impeachable offenses to show the boss how eager he is to stay on the job indefinitely and a new director of national intelligence who will doubtless behave the same way.

 

It’s a coincidence, I’m sure, that two positions with outsized potential for abuse in harassing the president’s critics are now held by two of the biggest Trump chuds in the government, neither of whom was approved by the Senate for their current jobs. Just as it must be a coincidence that this is an election year and the White House clearly expects both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to play influential roles in preventing, ahem, fraud at the polls this fall. In Bill Pulte, the president now has a figure who’ll wield that influence enthusiastically.

 

On top of everything else, naming Pulte to a position this sensitive is Trump’s way of extending a middle finger to a Senate that’s begun to resist his most loathsome impulses.

 

Recently Republicans in the chamber blocked money for his beloved ballroom, then turned around and tabled money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to protest his slush fund for MAGA-friendly criminals. The DOJ promised on Monday to abide by court rulings that have enjoined the fund (for now), but that wasn’t enough to reassure a conference that’s rightly suspicious of the White House’s willingness to kill the program permanently. Majority Leader John Thune believes the president is so committed to the fund that he might veto the immigration bill if it includes language that restricts it—although, as of late Tuesday, Blanche was swearing that the fund is well and truly dead.

 

In short, Trump’s own party is now interfering with the “YOLO phase” of his presidency. He’s given up on trying to please voters and is chasing his autocratic whims, however unpopular they might be, only to run into unlikely resistance lately from his own Duma-fied Republican Congress. Putting an unfit crony like Pulte in charge of national intelligence feels like an act of defiance under those circumstances: If the Senate GOP won’t make him happy, he’ll make himself happy by filling a key vacancy with a putrid loyalist appointment whom he surely knows they disdain.

 

And thanks to the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, there’s nothing they can do about it. Or is there?

 

Countermeasures.

 

“If the president decides they’re going to install a secretary of defense that isn’t actually confirmed, and Congress isn’t going to try to respond with their powers and try to stop that, I think the reality is that there’s not much that you can do.”

 

That’s what one expert told the Washington Post—in 2022, for a piece speculating about what a second Trump term might look like. Senate Republicans behaved with characteristic cowardice by doing zilch during the president’s first term to punish him for repeatedly ignoring their “advice and consent” power. What can they do now to make amends?

 

One thing they could do is amend the FVRA to prevent appointments like Pulte’s, provided they can find 20 Senate Republican votes to override the inevitable Trump veto. But they can’t: The caucus of disgruntled GOP lame ducks, while big and growing, ain’t that big. If there were 20 civic-minded conservatives in the chamber, the president would have been convicted and disqualified from holding future office five years ago.

 

Another thing they might do is declare that no more Trump nominees—including judicial ones—will be confirmed until a permanent replacement is named for the national intelligence job. Only four Republicans would be needed to join with Democrats to roadblock nominations (well, five, thanks to crypto-Republican John Fetterman), and there certainly are enough lame ducks to facilitate that.

 

But I doubt the Senate GOP has the stomach to see it through. If polling shows a blue wave inbound in November, would Republicans really let conservative judicial nominees languish unconfirmed, leaving a Democratic Senate to decide their fate next year?

 

As for executive nominees, the president might actually welcome a Senate roadblock. It would be a perfect excuse for him to lean in further on naming acting officials to lead agencies. I don’t want to do it, but they’ve left me no choice. The government needs to function, he might say of Republican obstructionists. Under the FVRA, he could staff up with all sorts of Pulte-esque flunkies and face no legal trouble for it until 2028.

 

The best leverage Senate Republicans have is probably the $72 billion immigration enforcement bill that was en route to passing before the president YOLO’d them into a political corner with ballroom money and the slush fund. That bill is the last major White House legislative priority of the year and potentially the last of Trump’s presidency if either house of Congress flips in November.

 

If the John Cornyn-Bill Cassidy lame-duck caucus were to tell him that it won’t pass until a new attorney general and director of national intelligence are confirmed, what would Trump do? Is having Todd Blanche and Bill Pulte in those roles worth more to him than a truckload of money for his highest policy priority?

 

My guess is … yeah. That’s what “the YOLO phase” is all about. Forced to choose between moving his agenda and maximizing his power to govern abusively, the president would follow his heart and trust the MAGA base to inundate Republican lame ducks with death threats until they cave and pass the immigration bill anyway.

 

But I don’t blame you if you think my entire line of argument here is silly.

 

There’s no strong reason, after all, to believe that a Republican conference that tolerated a parade of acting directors during Trump’s first term and voted for Bill Pulte unanimously to lead the FHFA will object to handing over national intelligence to a postliberal hatchet man. Even the lame ducks might plausibly convince themselves a nasty intra-party vote over the appointment isn’t worth it, as it would risk demoralizing right-wing voters before the election.

 

Pulte will likely serve for as long as the president wants him to serve, and not a day less. Just one more thing to celebrate next month as we reflect on the greatness of American democracy.