Over the past months, we’ve examined several cabinet-level departments and their performance against mission. Our examination of operational components inside the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) focused primarily on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In the coming months, we’ll be looking closely at the cabinet-level Departments of Defense and State – given the recent declarations of military action in South America and Iran – and then look at other key DHS operational components like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)

As we move closer to the February 13 deadline for a Senate vote to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), it is tempting to view incremental changes by DHS prior to the vote as the direct result of citizen surveillance efforts related to two tragedies in Minneapolis, or the sizeable weekend crowds in so many cities protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in general, or the polls that indicate a majority of Americans think that ICE has gone too far. It’s important to remember that DHS contains not only ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), but also the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and the Coast Guard. So effecting any form of change in a budget document is challenging with such considerations.

I met my first civilian bully in the small Iowa town where I grew up. A group of us who lived within blocks of one another were outside most of the year, doing everything from playing school in an old coal shed at our house, to afternoons spent at the swimming pool or at our small public library. We also played softball and tag football regularly, and traded comic books. Several of us also tracked Hit Parade sheet music and learned it, pretending to offer concerts in the park. Pretty innocuous, except for the neighborhood bully who lurked on the sidelines or interrupted our activities or our walks by threatening us and impeding our activities. For about a year, I recall that my reaction after trying to ignore him was to run inside my house and cower until he picked on someone else. At that point, I decided to look up all the words he called me and let him know he needed to stop or I would report him to both of our parents. Because he had no real power over me, I was able to back him off. I learned my first lesson about standing up to bullies.

No surprises in that headline because we’ve had trouble leap out at us at the federal level for nearly a year. There are so many examples to choose from, not only in the executive branch, but in Congress and the Supreme Court as well. Following along in the 2025 Project playbook shows us that, no matter how chaotic and illegal things might look, there are a few players -- Steven Miller, Scott Bessett, and Russell Vought come to mind—whose ideological discipline makes sure that the administration is sticking to the script. Ironically, of late that discipline has been fractured by two cabinet members—Pam Bondi and Pete Hegseth—and we are starting to see cracks in the previously loyal group who follow Trump and the administration wherever they are led.

In 2016, I was asked to write a chapter for a new British book titled Conduct Risk: A Practitioner’s Guide, on the root causes of conduct risk and how it manifests itself. I was writing primarily about financial institutions from an operational risk perspective, but my conclusions about those questions apply equally to governance issues in both the public and private sectors. Here, I want to identify the root causes I saw in 2015-2016 and provide several current examples that are destabilizing our country.

This past week saw the first stage of a Gaza Agreement agreed to by both Israel and Hamas (cease fire, hostage release, and prisoner exchange, as well as Israel moving back a border it occupies), and action should be realized this next week. Coincidentally, it was also the beginning of announcements of the 2025 Nobel prizes, perhaps the most highly prized global awards bestowed annually.

I’m writing this column on a sunny Sunday morning in a country that still has three branches of government, though two of them have been mostly overrun by machinations that threaten democracy. Article 1 of the Constitution is given over to the Legislative branch because elected representatives were given the power to override the Judicial and the Executive branches when those branches strayed outside the powers that the Constitution granted them. The checks and balances are straightforward, designed to prevent a concentration of power in any one branch:

President Carter established the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1979 with two missions: emergency management and civil defense. FEMA’s charter was further enhanced in 1988 with the Stafford Act, which laid out clear instructions and a framework for disaster response and recovery between the federal government and the states. After 9/11/2001, the federal government reorganized and created a new overarching cabinet department, Homeland Security (DHS), and absorbed FEMA and twenty-one other federal organizations to better coordinate and communicate where both civil defense and emergency management were concerned. Following the devastation along the Gulf Coast that Hurricane Katrina caused, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act of 2006 which redefined FEMA as a separate agency within DHS, defined its main role, made the FEMA Administrator a principal advisor to the President, the Homeland Security Council and the Secretary of Homeland Security for all matters related to emergency management in the United States.

No matter how many column inches are written about the Trump administration to analyze its behavior, the facts do not change and they lead to an inescapable conclusion, best summarized by Bruce Springsteen on the opening night of his European tour in mid-May.

Most of what I’m writing about this month is beyond the pale, which means actions that are “bizarre, outside the bounds of civilized behavior.” The behavior of the Trump administration is corrupt and shows no respect for the rule of law or the principle of checks and balances.