Digest: Trump's empty seats, and making our own steel

The President has only filled a minority of senior federal positions after for months in office; and we cannot debate state protection for vital industries if we don't know what we mean

Two issues I wanted to capture while they bobbed to the surface of the news, though each will no doubt recur.

Trump and whose army?

One of the issues which arose during my appearance on Times Radio’s Frontline podcast this week was the calibre of advisers and officials surrounding President Donald Trump. I pointed out that, during his first term as President in 2017-21, Trump, knowing almost nothing even about the basic mechanics of government or the atmosphere of Washington DC, had been obliged to appoint some relatively experienced and mainstream figures to senior positions in his administration, at least at first. The results were not universally good: Rex Tillerson, former Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, was reckoned to have been the worst Secretary of State in generations during his brief tenure in 2017-18, while experienced senator Jeff Sessions lasted only six months longer as Attorney General (2017-18) and was reckless, incompetent and legally illiterate, finally being dismissed.

On the other hand, former United States Marine Corps general Jim Mattis maintained the professionalism and discipline of the armed forces in two years as Secretary of Defense (2017-19), former senator and ambassador Dan Coats held a line as Director of National Intelligence (2017-19) and even ex-Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley showed a degree of independence and realism as Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2017 to 2018.

In his second term as President, Trump has no such counterweights. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is experienced and knowledgeable in foreign affairs, having served on the United States Senate on Foreign Relations and been Chairman or Ranking Member of the Select Committee on Intelligence from 2020 to 2025, but he has sacrificed huge credibility and self-respect to be admitted to the President’s cercle. The same was true of Michael Waltz, National Security Advisor until the beginning of this month and now awaiting confirmation as Permanent Representative to the United Nations. A highly decorated Special Forces officer, Waltz spent six years in the US House of Representatives, and was a member of the Armed Services Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. But he too had been obliged to disavow what he knew to be true and assert ludicrous pretences and falsehoods to earn the trust of the White House.

By contrast, there are several cabinet officials who under normal circumstances would never have come close to confirmation for senior positions in the federal administration. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Kristi Noem, Homeland Security Secretary, are all positively unfit for office, while the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, the Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, and Scott Turner, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, are either weak and poorly qualified or simply odd and sycophantic.

That such incapable or poorly qualified candidates were nominated by the President and approved by the Senate is disheartening. Congressional Republicans have effectively set aside any notion of independence from the White House or responsibility to the common good, as the confirmation of Hegseth by one vote, the Vice-President’s tie-breaker, demonstrated. If they were willing to nod Hegseth through, it was clear there was no-one to whom they would object. As The Washington Post’s veteran columnist George F. Will put it:

Suppose you assembled 100 intelligent, public-spirited people experienced with the complexities of managing enormous bureaucracies, deeply familiar with today’s geopolitical challenges, alert to the importance and sensitivities of allied nations, and acquainted with large private-sector manufacturing and the precarious condition of the US defense industrial base. Suppose you asked each of these 100 to list 100 people qualified to be defense secretary. There could be, cumulatively, 10,000 different names. What is the probability that even one of those would be Pete Hegseth? Approximately zero.

The absence of any honest scrutiny, however, merely confirmed what we had known for some time, and what I argued in The Spectator in April: the Republican Party has ceased to exist as an independent political entity, and has allowed itself to be wholly subsumed into Donald Trump’s personality cult. It is not clear whether it will, or even can, recover.

There is another factor at work. Not only are many government positions occupied by the incapable or the unsuitable, a huge number, four months into the administration, are not occupied at all. The Washington Post maintains a tracker of 822 government posts from the 1,300 or so which require the confirmation of the Senate, of which only 68 have been approved (and 19 of those are the President’s cabinet, with another, Waltz, awaiting consideration).

Meanwhile, 244 nominees are now within the approval process and will be considered in due course, and five candidates have been announced but not yet formally nominated. Currently, 323 positions in the senior levels of the federal government do not have a nominee.

To have 68 confirmations at this stage in his presidency, four-and-a-half months in, is a better performance than in his first term, admittedly. Indeed, during his first hundred days, he had more office-holders confirmed than three of the last four presidencies (including his own first term). Whereas President Bush and President Obama then saw the pace speed up considerably, once the most senior and most controversial nominations have been dealt with, the current administration has seen no such increase. This is despite the Republicans controlling the Senate and therefore being able to dictate the pace of business.

It is the positions for which Trump has not even made nominations that causes more concern. During his first term, huge numbers of roles were never filled because the President, who has no appetite for detail or paperwork, did not think they were important. By the end of his time in office in January 2021, 228 positions remained vacant without even a nominee, nine had been nominated but not confirmed and four had yet to be nominated officially, a total of 241. By contrast, 524 candidates had been confirmed, so, roughly speaking, one in every three positions was vacant after four years.

We know Trump harbours a bone-deep belief that the federal government is vastly overstaffed and wasteful, hence his encouragement of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a poorly focused, frenetic, splenetic assault on any bureaucracy it could find. He is also innately suspicious of “the government” in its broadest sense (despite the fact that he is President of the United States) because he sees in it forces which have not only held him back from doing as he wishes but actively sought to punish him for wrongdoing. So he begins with a mindset which is not well disposed towards officialdom.

Whatever view you take of the expansive, ambitious, reactionary Project 2025 devised under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation to reshape the federal government and make it more accommodating and responsive to Trump’s agenda, one of its key elements was the installation of ideologically sympathetic candidates in positions across the bureaucracy. But the text of its blueprint is more than 900 pages long: this may be autocratic Christian ethno-nationalism but it is not for the indolent. By contrast, President Trump by all accounts has an astonishingly short attention span, and when it runs out he becomes impatient and irritable. Not only is there no prospect of him diligently devoting long hours to the business of nominating reliable allies to relatively minor and routine posts, but he is also likely to see little value in anyone doing so.

It is true we are not yet five months into this presidency. Nevertheless, nearly a tenth of Trump’s second term has almost passed. The first weeks and months have been chaotic, a blizzard of executive orders and dynamic action of sometimes-dubious legality. We saw this week the US Court of International Trade rule that the administrations imposition of blanket tariffs was in breach of federal law, the executive branch exceeding its powers and intruding on the privileges of Congress, which has exclusive authority to regulate commerce between the United States and other countries. This is a flailing brawl, not a carefully planned policy agenda.

To carry out his wishes, President Trump has a number of deeply ill-qualified and unsuitable subordinates. But he also has a very empty grandstand behind him, and there is reason to think he is indifferent to the fact, or perhaps even sees it as a virtuous signal of efficiency. The Trump White House has huge ambition and unshakeable self-righteousness, but it fundamentally lacks the capacity to govern well, irrespective of its policy intentions. This is a problem which may well only get worse.

A shield of steel

A confluence of defence procurement, tariff policy, Chinese industrial chicanery and recent emergency legislation has conspired to make voters think more about the steel industry in recent months than perhaps they ever have, certainly since the economic and industrial shifts of the 1980s. There are several issues worth considering in terms of steel but the one I want to pick up just briefly here, which is defence-focused but has wider relevance, goes without gross oversimplification like this:

1. Steel is required for many sectors of manufacturing but it is an essential component in military production, especially large platforms like ships, submarines, aircraft and tanks;

2. Britain used to have an enormous steel industry which, at its height around 1875, produced 40 per cent of the world’s steel and 47 per cent of its pig iron, but is now 35th in the world, producing just over four million tonnes of steel last year: that is five per cent of the total the United States produces, 10 per cent of Germany’s output, and 1/250 of China’s total production. Our approximate peers are countries like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Slovakia;

3. If we do not maintain a domestic steel industry—the lack of which would make us unique in the G7—we become reliant on imported steel for essential weapons of war, which could be a deadly vulnerability during a full-scale global conflict;

4. That is an unacceptable risk, and steel is a critical national industry, therefore the normal rules of market economics alone cannot dictate the government’s approach to the steel industry, because domestic capacity must be maintained, even if that requires intervention or state financial assistance for the steel industry.

Applying to the whole of Europe rather than just the UK, that set of theses, roughly speaking, was advanced in The Financial Times this week by Elisabeth Braw, an academic and journalist specialising in national security and the globalised economy. What follows is in no way directed at Braw specifically, whom I find interesting, obviously well informed and often persuasive, but I happened to read her article and it became a proxy for many others I have read.

Braw sets out the argument straightforwardl: “to manufacture arms and all manner of other crucial goods, one needs a steel industry”, she states, and “if cheap steel [principally from China] keeps flooding Europe and displacing domestic companies, we risk disastrous dependency”. She accepts the possibility of arguing that job losses due to uncompetitive sectors in Western countries are unfortunate but inevitable in a declining industry, and that “clean steel” may not be a realistic target if consumers don’t want to pay for it. But there is something more fundamental that that, Braw argues.

Steel is not just any commodity. It is used in everything from cutlery to cars and bridges—and in defence equipment. The versatile alloy is a critical component in rifles, armoured vehicles tanks, fighter jets and naval ships. Only a small number of companies globally, including some in Europe, make steel of the quality required in military equipment—but due to the flooded markets, the European firms that make such top-flight steel are in a precarious position… European defence companies could… sell products comprising [Chinese] steel… then, once we’ve made ourselves dependent on steel from other countries, they could simply stop selling us that steel.

Insofar as it goes, I accept the internal logic of her argument. I have no greater desire than the next man to see Britain’s steel industry decline and wither, and I agree that relying on steel from other countries introduces a degree of supply-chain risk which is not present in domestically made steel. My uncle worked in the steel industry in Scotland and I’m cognisant of the economic stagnation and deprivation that the contraction of the domestic steel industry has left in its wake.

At the very least, though, I have some points I think should be raised. The first is a very common, nonsensical and ahistorical assumption that there is anything unusual or in principle alarming about various industries waxing and waning, and the dominant economic drivers of different cities and regions changing over decades and centuries. The competition is still, but Jonathan Reynolds, the Business and Trade Secretary, may have uttered the most witless, self-evidently false and absurd statement by a minister in the current government when he said last September “Port Talbot has always been and will always be a steelmaking town”.

How can he possibly know Port Talbot “will always be a steelmaking town”? What iron law of economics provides for that? Where else in the UK, never mind the world, has industries which are perpetually competitive and dominant? How, if this were commonplace, would innovation ever take place? How would new products ever come to the market?

Even allowing for the likelihood that Reynolds does not mean to be taken literally when he says “always”—in which case he should be more careful and precise with his language, as a cabinet minister with considerable responsibilities over large parts of the UK economy—his remarks are instructive. They represent a commonly expressed kind of industrial nostalgia, yearning for a semi-imagined past of large-scale manufacturing which employed substantial numbers of workers in big, highly vidible factories, yards and workshops. I wrote about this in City A.M. last October, not long after Reynolds had agreed the deal with Tata Steel which provoked his absurd declaration, pointing out that “industry does not disappear by accident, it does so because it ceases to be competitive” and saying that “when these economic shifts occur, there are two choices: subsidise or diversify”.

That first choice, to subsidise industries with public money to protect them against natural lack of competitivity, underlies many of the discussions about steel but is not always acknowledged. The current government talks about having a “steel strategy” but it proceeds with wholly backwards logic in economic terms. It deigns to conceive of the involvement of private enterprise when it says that “delivering the steel sector that the UK is capable of cannot be achieved by government alone” (who imagined that it could?) and refers to “our plan to support the sector to best exploit available opportunities to deliver long-term growth” and “identifying support for investment opportunities to support the steel sector”.

What all of this actually means, whether you approve or disapprove, is cushioning industry from reality with tax-payers’ money. The steel strategy has been promised up to £2.5 billion through the National Wealth Fund in addition to the existing £500 million “investment” in Tata Steel’s Port Talbot site for “the building of an electric arc furnace”. The government, to be clear, is paying to upgrade the facilities of a private sector manufacturer so that the manufacturer is spared the financial burden. It is no wonder that Tata Steel looks and feels more economically competitive if a significant and vital element of expenditure is taken off its hands.

This interventionist position makes me uneasy but I understand the logic of it. Steel, it says, is of paramount importance (“not just any commodity”, as Braw says) that we cannot leave its production to market forces (because, as things stand, we have seen where that leads: to the virtual elimination if not of Britain’s steel sector than at least its wholesale transferral to foreign ownership). Is the logical corollary of that that there is no cost too high in terms of “support” for the steel industry? That governments must be prepared, to protect our national security, and pay any price, no matter how uncompetitive, to act as the sole customer for a British-based and British-owned steel manufacturing sector? If that is the case, might it not be easier simply to nationalise the industry, as was the case from 1949 to 1953 and 1967 to 1988? Or is there a tipping point, a price which simply becomes too high to pay?

Braw is silent on this, but in fairness she is not alone. The furthest she will go in her article for The Financial Times is to say “one needs a steel industry” and “steeling ourselves for an uncertain future means having steel at our disposal”. She gives no more detail, and believers in “industrial strategies” are usually reluctant to talk about hypothetical sums of money, preferring to proceed on a case-by-case basis. That is topsy-turvy: we have to understand the principle behind the practice. I don’t have a watertight counter-argument, though I would point out that, until electric arc furnaces can fully replace blast furnaces in terms of the quality of steel manufactured, the UK already relies on imported coke and iron ore to make steel anyway, so the idea of self-sufficiency is moot. I suspect also that if every possible vendor nation of steel in the world refused to export steel to the UK, our primary geopolitical and economic challenges would be more profound that manufacturing which involves steel.

It is not illicit to place some other priority ahead of market competition under specific circumstances, and it is possible that steel is a commodity which requires security to supersede normal principles of commerce. But we have to understand the full potential consequences of taking that attitude and subsidising the steel industry. More and more at the moment, I find myself frustrated by people’s apparent reluctance to follow their own trains of thought and find what lies at the end of the line. But unless we chase those connections as far as they will go, we cannot properly make policy, because we don’t fully understand what our options are.