President-elect Donald Trump has announced Cabinet and other senior-level appointments that likely will face challenges in implementing some of the returning president’s promised reforms.
Some key appointments—including treasury secretary and secretary of health and human services—have yet to be announced by Trump.
Wednesday afternoon, Trump announced he would name Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., as attorney general, the nation’s chief law enforcement official as head of the Justice Department. When Trump battled the Justice Department in his first term, Gaetz was one of his staunchest defenders as a member of the House Judiciary Committee.
Trump named Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.—a rival in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries—as his secretary of state.
State Department bureaucrats are likely to show “inherent resistance” to whoever Trump names to the job, said Victoria Coates, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation.
“The top priority of the new secretary [of state] should be to ensure that the department is responsive to presidential directives, not resistant to them,” Coates, a deputy national security adviser during the first Trump administration, told The Daily Signal.
“The secretary should make crystal clear that he or she is implementing President Trump’s policies, not continuing on past practices,” Coates said. “One way to do this would be to significantly expand the roster of political appointee ambassadors, and give them political appointee staff members as well as foreign service officers. Another would be to zero-out all foreign assistance in the next budget and require all requests for funding to be thoroughly reviewed.”
Also on Trump’s foreign policy team will be former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Israel; Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and New York businessman Steven Witkoff, appointed as U.S. envoy to the Middle East.
Trump also named Fox News host, Army veteran, and author Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.
“At a time when bloat and woke initiatives detract from the core warfighting mission of our armed forces, we need a secretary like Pete who has both served in combat and advocated for veterans on Capitol Hill,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said in a public statement. “Under President Biden and Secretary [Lloyd] Austin, our military has grown weaker while foreign conflicts have increased. President Trump and Secretary Hegseth will make our military great again while continuing to put America First.”
Trump also named to his national security team former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a former Democrat who endorsed Trump during his 2024 campaign, as director of national intelligence; former Rep. John Ratcliffe of Texas, who held the DNI post during the last eight months of the first Trump administration, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., as Trump’s national security adviser.
Trump announced that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem is his choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which, among other things, is in charge of protecting the nation from illegal immigrants and terrorists.
DHS, created in the wake of 9/11, is known for a large bureaucracy that includes many bureaucrats who sought to slow-walk Trump’s policies in his first administration.
The best way to deal with deep state issues in the DHS is “radical transparency,” said Lora Ries, former acting deputy chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security.
“Americans need to know how their money has been spent and to regain trust in government,” Ries, who now directs the Border and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
Trump, who faced conservatives’ criticism in his first term for spending levels, announced late Tuesday that two entrepreneurs and prominent supporters—Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—would lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Ramaswamy unsuccessfully challenged Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
At this point, this isn’t an official department of the government with policy-making power.
The Daily Signal asked several experts with The Heritage Foundation to assess the first 100 days for Trump Cabinet officials and what some of their unique challenges might be in tackling an entrenched bureaucracy that has come to be known as the “deep state.”
Nevertheless, Trump’s treasury secretary and director of the Office of Management and Budget could use Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s recommendations to cut woke expenditures or green energy subsidies, said Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation.
“They will both be uniquely situated to help audit the government and identify waste and be able to start acting on DOGE’s recommendations through rulemaking and other executive actions,” Stern told The Daily Signal, referring to the next treasury secretary and OMB director.
“They will have to ensure that appointees are in a position to audit the work of career ‘civil servants’ who, during the first Trump term, worked to undermine the administration and are shielded by federal law from being held accountable for not doing their jobs,” said Stern, who formerly led a budget and spending task force for the Republican Study Committee, a large and influential caucus of House Republicans.
Stern added that the Treasury Department and OMB director will need to use Schedule F and other tools “to make the career federal workforce under them as close to [serving] at-will as possible to ensure they do their jobs and are held accountable.”
Trump announced the Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’),” Trump wrote in the post. “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excessive regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies—Essential to the Save America movement.”
Trump announced that former Rep. Lee Zeldin, who ran unsuccessfully in 2022 for governor of New York, will be administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA and the Department of Interior will be important to the second Trump administration’s energy policies. But Zeldin and the next interior secretary must “make it clear that they have a mandate from the American people to make energy reliable, resilient, and affordable,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment at The Heritage Foundation.
“America needs cheaper energy and a stronger electrical grid. The interior secretary needs to task the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management to roll back prohibitions on offshore drilling and issue more leases, and the Bureau of Land Management to do the same with onshore drilling,” Furchtgott-Roth, former chief of staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, told The Daily Signal. “The Bureau of Land Management is also responsible for enforcing the boundaries of national monuments, which were enlarged by President Biden and need to be reduced.”
Furchtgott-Roth said the EPA should address the Biden-Harris administration’s tailpipe emissions rule, intended to convert much of America to electric vehicles, and its rule to force power plants to reduce coal emissions 90% by 2039:
Equally important are regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency. The tailpipe rule would require 70% of new cars sold to be hybrid or battery-powered electric by 2032. This rule has been challenged and the EPA administrator working with the Department of Justice should pause this rule on Day One, due to the legal challenges.
The power plant rule would require all coal-fired power plants and some natural gas-fired power plants to close by 2040 if they can’t sequester 95% of their carbon emissions by the early 2030s. This rule raises the cost of electricity and weakens the grid and should be paused by the EPA administrator, working with the Justice Department.