A few weeks after Election Day 2024, Donald Trump announced his choice to lead the FBI. Implicit in the announcement, of course, was the fact that the services of the sitting, Trump-appointed FBI director, Chris Wray, would no longer be needed.
Wray took the unsubtle hint and said he would voluntarily step down, and his resignation would take effect on Inauguration Day. It meant, among other things, that Trump and his team would need to settle on an acting FBI director as Kash Patel worked his way through the Senate confirmation process.
That position ultimately went to Brian Driscoll, who got the job by accident. As The New York Times reported, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, “the White House identified the wrong agent as acting director on its website and never corrected the mistake.”
It was an early indication of an important problem: The Republican president and his operation don’t exactly excel in personnel matters.
A few weeks later, Trump’s Small Business Administration fired a group of employees, then said they’d been ousted by mistake, then went ahead and fired them again.
Around the same time, the Trump administration fired a group of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), whose job it is to oversee the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Soon after, the administration came to realize what these fired workers do and why they are important, and they decided it’d be a good idea to rehire the people they had fired.
There was, however, a problem: Evidently, after the Trump administration carelessly fired these employees, they were no longer able to access their DOE email accounts, and the NNSA didn’t have their personal email accounts on file, making it difficult to ask them to come back to work.
The list is still growing. NBC News reported:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday that, over the weekend, it accidentally fired ‘several’ agency employees who are working on the federal government’s response to the H5N1 avian flu outbreak. The agency said it is now trying to quickly reverse the firings.
Oops. The same report added, “The layoffs concerned a number of Republican lawmakers, who privately warned the Trump administration that such cuts could hamper the government’s bird flu response and asked them to reconsider, according to two Republican sources with direct knowledge of the situation.” Republican Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska was willing to say on the record, “They need to be more cautious.” Even if someone were inclined to approve of the White House and the DOGE operation trying to slash the federal workforce, is anyone prepared to defend Team Trump’s increasingly shambolic approach to personnel policy?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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