With most top Trump picks named, the focus shifts to deputies

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump says his Cabinet picks are meant to shake up a broken system. Now attention is turning to the deputies and hundreds of lower-level officials who will be needed to put those ambitions into action.

Take the Defense Department. Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, 44-year-old Pete Hegseth, is a combat veteran and Fox News host who may seek to scrap diversity programs and slash the Pentagon workforce. But he has little management experience and would need a host of aides who share the same goals and know how to deliver on them.

“If he’s going to drive change in that massive bureaucracy, people need to know where the levers are and how to get things done,” said John Ferrari, a retired major general and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The same considerations will apply to other nominees Trump may have been chosen in part for the deep skepticism they hold toward the bureaucracies they would lead. Among them are Tulsi Gabbard, the choice for director of national intelligence, who has criticized U.S. intelligence-gathering, and Matt Gaetz, who appears intent on bringing a wrecking ball to a Justice Department that in the past investigated both him and Trump.

In a sign he would move quickly on the appointments that matter to him, Trump announced Thursday night he would nominate Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general. Blanche is a former Manhattan federal prosecutor who represented Trump in his New York hush money case. As second in command to Gaetz, he would be responsible for day-to-day operations of a bureaucracy with 115,000 employees.

For the sprawling Pentagon — commonly described as the world’s largest organization and the biggest U.S. employer — senators may be more comfortable confirming Hegseth’s nomination, Ferrari said, “if they believe that he’s going to be surrounded by people who understand the complexity of the building.”

Although cabinet members may choose lower-level advisers, Trump’s nominations for top deputies — and their knowledge of the organizations they lead — will help reveal how serious he is about delivering on the changes he’s promising. Some vocal Trump backers who haven’t secured a top job could round out those positions.

They include Elbridge Colby, a deputy assistant secretary of defense early in Trump’s first administration who is known for his hawkish views on China, as well as former Trump administration aides Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, both currently at the America First Policy Institute.

‘Management Style’

Mike Rounds, a Republican senator from South Dakota and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which will vet the next defense secretary, said the choice of deputies could help determine if Hegseth wins approval. “It depends on his management style, and we don’t know what his management style is yet,” Rounds said.

“If he incorporates the deputies to a further extent, and if he’s bringing in people with significant technical expertise and background, that could play a role,” he said.

One unknown: whether Trump’s nominees will get a say in choosing their direct reports or the president will decide positions too, potentially creating the friction with agency heads that emerged at times in Trump’s first term.

“In any administration, the work done at the deputies level can matter a lot,” said Justin Logan, director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato think tank in Washington. “In this administration, it’s going to be particularly true.”

Historically, secretaries of defense and their deputies have tended to split up portfolios. The secretary typically focuses on external issues, and the deputy focuses on bureaucratic management of the Pentagon and other domestic concerns, such as industrial production.

James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, was a retired four-star Marine better known for his no-nonsense command of troops than his management prowess. His deputy was former Boeing Co. executive Pat Shanahan, who handled budget issues, management initiatives and major defense programs.

Hegseth, by contrast, appears more focused on personnel and diversity policies, suggesting on a recent podcast the need to oust General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second Black person to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. After the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in 2020, Brown released a video in which he said his own experiences as a Black man in the military “didn’t always sing of liberty and equality.”

Before the election, Hegseth told conservative podcast host Shawn Ryan that “the institution is going sideways — the Department of Defense, the Army, pick your service.” To course correct, he said, “you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, any general that was involved, admiral or whatever, anyone that was involved in any of the DEI, woke shi* —- has got to go,” he said.

Now one big question is whether he can follow through — and has the support of deputies who know how to pull the levers of power.

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(With assistance from Daniel Flatley and Tony Capaccio.)