Czars and White House influence

29 Jan, 2026

Tom Homan has arrived in Minnesota to take the reins of Operation Metro Surge.

1. I was both impressed and relieved by his press conference. Homan is very conservative on immigration policy, but he also presents as serious and sober. That's a huge upgrade here.

2. Elevating his role over the operation at the expense of the Noem, Lewandowski, Miller, and Bovino crowd has to be a directionally-correct move in terms of leadership, competence, and policy.

3. Homan's official position title in the White House payroll data is "border czar."

4. That's legally meaningless. Like most EOP/White House jobs, his role isn't statutorily defined and doesn't come with any authority under law. Basically, pretty much everyone at the EOP/White House is technically just a policy advisor to the president.

5. His salary of $195,000 puts him in the top tier of White House staff. You can think of White House policy jobs as generally having three tiers: Assistant to the President, Deputy Assistant to the President, and Special Assistant to the President. $195k is in the Assistant to the President range, same money Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, and Peter Navarro are making.

6. The concept of a "czar" is not new---it's been around since the creation of the modern White House in FDR's time. At various times (particularly during the Obama administration) it has been a fear-mongering phrase used by opponents of the administration (these unaccountable czars are running the government!) but the concept is sound: the White House wants to coordinate policy across executive branch agencies, so the president creates a single, high-profile point person in the White House to manage the portfolio.

7. The basic problem for the White House is how to control policy in the agencies. The model you were taught in civics---with the president at the top of the executive branch---is mostly wrong in practice. A much better model is to think of the executive agencies as the part of the government that does stuff, and everyone else as trying to influence those outcomes: the president (and the so-called presidential branch in the EOP), Congress, the courts, the agency heads and civil servants, interest groups, etc.

8. The White House has many tools to try to influence the executive branch, most notably the appointment power and top-down control over budget formulation. Both allow presidents to "politicize" the agencies themselves. In addition, every president tries to centralize decision-making, by pulling policy decisions out of the agencies and into the White House.

9. Czars are perhaps the best example of the concept of "influence without authority." They have no governing authority under law; they can't hire people, fire people, direct policy, or make spending decisions with discretionary appropriations. What they do have is the implicit backing of the president and the authority he has to do all of those things, or to persuade others to do them.

10. Running policy directly out of the White House can be dangerous if it becomes too centralized and top-down.¹ The White House mostly doesn't know things; they rely on the agencies for information, and the standard policy development process involves lots of bottom-up agency input, both to avoid traps and to build buy-in. The downside, of course, is that by making the agencies players, you open yourself up to push-back, slow-walking, leaks, and all the rest.

11. A czar like Homan can be helpful in these spots. He's a longtime LEO with high-level experience running ICE and strong familiarity with both border policy and the border security bureaucracy. He's also not tied to a particular agency, so he's better positioned to coordinate activities across them.

12. You might ask why a czar is preferable to just running this stuff through the DHS Secretary? Presidents often sour quickly on cabinet officials because (1) they didn't have free choice of those officials to begin with because of the Senate confirmation requirement; (2) Secretaries have dual masters because of their need to please the Hill, especially in regard to appropriations; (3) Secretaries also need to maintain strong credibility within their departments, which often puts them at odds with the White House on policy; (4) Secretaries often have too big of a portfolio; SecDHS, for instance, has to think about TSA and FEMA and the Coast Guard and can't spend all her time on the border. A White House Border Czar has none of these encumberments.

13. So when Trump sends Homan to Minnesota, Homan's not legally calling the shots, in the sense that he can't actually order the senior officials at CBP or ICE to do anything. A lot of the time, you can ignore or push-back on the president and get away with it. Double-so for some Assistant to the president. But his implicit backing by Trump and the high-profile nature of his assignment and his field trip to get on-the-ground in Minneapolis basically puts all of the officials with decision-making authority in the agencies on notice that they better use that authority in accordance with Homan's direction, or at the very least work with Homan in a cooperative manner, because the president is serious about this and watching and has made it a priority. He's in charge, in practice.

#ICE #czars #implementation #presidency