Three Cabinet-Level Posts Are Being Run by Officials the Senate Never Confirmed

Right now, three of the federal government's most powerful offices are being run by people the U.S. Senate has never confirmed to those jobs.

At the Justice Department, Todd Blanche is the acting attorney general. At the Labor Department, Keith Sonderling is the acting secretary. And at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the office that oversees the 18 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community — Bill Pulte is the acting director.

None of the three has cleared a Senate confirmation vote for the job he's holding. Two are formal nominees waiting for the Senate to act. The third isn't a nominee at all.

That's not, by itself, illegal. Federal law lets a president fill a vacant office with a temporary "acting" official — for a while. But confirmation is the check the Constitution builds in: it's how the Senate vets a person before they run an agency, and how the public gets a recorded vote putting senators on the record. When an agency runs on an acting leader instead, that check is skipped. Do it briefly and it's routine. Do it for months — or run one of these offices with no nominee in sight while it makes decisions that are hard to undo — and a gap opens where the accountability is supposed to be.

How each seat came open

The four posts that lost their confirmed leader in the administration's first year and a half didn't lose them the same way, and the differences matter.

• Justice. Pam Bondi, confirmed early in the term, was fired in April 2026 — by multiple accounts, over her handling of the Justice Department's Epstein files. President Trump elevated Blanche, his former personal defense attorney, to run the department as acting attorney general. Blanche was formally nominated in June; his Senate confirmation hearing is set for July 15–16.
• Labor. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, confirmed 67–32 in March 2025, resigned in April 2026 amid a Labor Department inspector-general investigation, according to multiple news outlets. Sonderling, her Senate-confirmed deputy, has been running the department since; the president nominated him to the permanent job on June 29.
• Intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed 52–48, had planned to resign effective June 30 but moved it up to June 19 — not amid scandal, but to support her husband through a cancer diagnosis. That distinction is worth keeping straight: her departure is a family matter, not a controversy. What's notable is her replacement. Trump named Bill Pulte — the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, with no background in intelligence — as acting director. Pulte has not been nominated to the intelligence job, and he continues to run the housing-finance agency at the same time.

There was a fourth post in this group, and it's the reason the honest count is three, not four. At Homeland Security, Kristi Noem was pushed out in March 2026 — but the Senate confirmed her replacement, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, 54–45, on March 23. DHS has a confirmed leader. It doesn't belong in this story, and saying so is the point: this is about who the Senate signed off on, not about who was forced out. Among the government's Cabinet-level posts, these three — Justice, Labor, and intelligence — are the only ones now run by someone the Senate has not confirmed to the job.

What confirmation actually does — and what skipping it skips

Confirmation isn't a formality. Before the Senate votes, a nominee goes through an FBI background check, files financial disclosures, answers for conflicts of interest, and sits for a public hearing where senators can press them under oath. Then the vote itself forces every senator to take a recorded position. An acting official goes through none of that. They're simply designated and put to work.

That's the plain-English version of the "confirmation gap." It's cleanest to see at intelligence. Pulte was, in fact, confirmed by the Senate once — but to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency, not to run intelligence. Confirmation is job-specific: senators vetted him for housing finance. The Senate Intelligence Committee has never examined him, never held a hearing on his fitness to oversee the nation's spy agencies, and never had to vote on it. Under the Vacancies Act it doesn't have to, because someone already confirmed to one Senate post can be designated acting in another — so Pulte now runs U.S. intelligence and the housing-finance agency at the same time.

The law drew a line here on purpose

Congress didn't leave "acting" leadership open-ended. A 1998 law, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, lets an acting official serve for 210 days from the day the seat came open — plus however long a nomination is pending before the Senate. It also limits who can serve: usually the office's own deputy, or another official the Senate has already confirmed somewhere.

The Supreme Court has read those limits strictly. In a 2017 case, NLRB v. SW General, the Court held that a person nominated for a Senate-confirmed office generally can't also serve as its acting head — with a narrow exception for someone who has served at least 90 days as the office's Senate-confirmed deputy (its "first assistant") before the vacancy opened. That exception covers both men, and by a wide margin: the Senate confirmed Blanche as deputy attorney general on March 5, 2025, 393 days — about 13 months — before Bondi's ouster created the vacancy on April 2, 2026. It confirmed Sonderling as deputy labor secretary on March 12, 2025, 404 days before Chavez-DeRemer's resignation opened that seat on April 20, 2026. Their double role — acting leader and nominee at once — is, on these facts, lawful. This piece isn't claiming otherwise.

And there's a hard edge to the law worth knowing. If an acting official's authority runs out and no one is validly in the seat, the statute says the office "shall remain vacant," and any action taken by an unauthorized person "shall have no force or effect" and "may not be ratified." In plain terms: decisions made past the legal limit can be void — and can't be fixed later.

No one here has crossed that line as of today. All three vacancies are recent, and every acting official is still inside the window the law allows. This is a gap forming, not a gap breached. The one to watch is intelligence: with no nomination pending to extend the clock, Pulte's window is the one that could actually run out — sometime around late January 2027 — with nothing scheduled to close it.

This isn't new — and last time, some of it was ruled unlawful

Governing through acting officials is not an invention of this administration, and pretending it is would be wrong. In his first term, President Trump said so openly: he liked acting officials because, in his words, "I like acting. It gives me more flexibility." His first-term Homeland Security Department ran for long stretches on acting leaders.

But that history carries a warning, not just a precedent. In August 2020, the Government Accountability Office — Congress's nonpartisan watchdog — found that two of those first-term acting DHS leaders, Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, were serving unlawfully, because the department had skipped the proper order of succession in installing them. That's the same fragility the current law spells out: when an acting designation is defective, the actions taken under it are exposed. It happened before. It's the risk the statute is built around.

The strongest case for the administration — and where it holds up

The administration's defense is real. Acting officials are legal and ordinary; every recent president has used them. The Vacancies Act expressly authorizes exactly this. Two of the three seats — Justice and Labor — do have nominees moving through the Senate, so the gap there is temporary by design and partly a function of how long the Senate takes. And a president is entitled to build his own team.

Most of that holds. Justice and Labor are, on the facts, roughly how the system is supposed to work: a temporary hand on the wheel while the Senate does its job. The place the defense runs thin is intelligence — because there is no nominee moving through the Senate at all, and the office isn't sitting quietly while it waits.

Why the intelligence seat is different

Bill Pulte isn't holding the intelligence office in place. He's remaking it. Since late June, he has carried out rounds of firings across the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — dozens of career officials, by multiple accounts — with the deepest cuts reported to target the National Counterterrorism Center, the body created after 9/11 to connect the dots and stop attacks: a reported list of some 300 of its roughly 1,000 staff. Pulte has framed the cuts as "reducing redundant, or non-critical, personnel." The top Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes, along with former intelligence officials, have warned that gutting the counterterrorism center risks the government's ability to see a plot coming.

Set the two facts next to each other. The person making deep, hard-to-reverse cuts to America's counterterrorism apparatus is running the office as an acting official no Senate committee ever examined for the job, with no confirmation hearing on the calendar and no nominee named. That is what a confirmation gap looks like when nothing is closing it.

What you can do

The confirmation process is the one point where the public's voice is built into the system — and there's a live deadline. Blanche's confirmation hearing is July 15–16; Sonderling's nomination is already before the Senate.

• Find out who represents you, and whether either of your senators sits on the committees that own these decisions: Judiciary (which handles the attorney general), Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (Labor), or Intelligence (which oversees the DNI). A senator on one of those panels has a direct vote or voice.
• For Justice and Labor, there's a hearing and a vote to weigh in on — tell your senators what you want them to ask and how you want them to vote before the record closes.
• For intelligence, there's nothing to weigh in on — and that's the point. There's no nominee, no hearing, no scheduled vote. The lever there is to ask your representatives on the intelligence committees to hold an oversight hearing on who is running the office, and to demand the administration name a nominee the Senate can actually examine.