DHS is going to take a long, long time to clean out. Decent people were fired or quit in disgust, the absolute worst were given free reign, and almost all safeguards were shredded

It's less a cabinet department than a Guardia Civil at this point https://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/1353263975262081024

Biden flatly doesn't control all of DHS at the moment. I highly doubt anyone in the WH wants federal forces on protest guard duty, least of all from DHS

These same people had a four year long orgy of unrestrained brutality. They're not going to just stop bc of a new POTUS

Additionally, there are real limits on what things a normal POTUS can do *right this second* about most real time events. Right now Biden can either tell his new DHS Sec to Fix This Shit, which I'm sure he has, or he can do something about it as POTUS

Simple, right? Nope

All those executive orders Biden has signed? HORDES of staff have worked on it. Lawyers, Cabinet staff, Hill Dems, copy editors. POTUS doing a POTUS thing is a massive, sometimes USG-wide undertaking *when done properly*

What Trump did was basically sign random bits of paper and then have flunkies round up enough people in the Cabinets willing to do bad shit to do something approximating what Trump ranted

As Biden is showing, that is *straightforward* to address. But not quickly

Even the simplest fixes need to be legal according to the entire federal code and all relevant rules and regs. It needs to have an implementation plan, and available bodies to enact it. Review by different people in charge of different areas. Office keys. Everything

Doing things with the speed of a tweet button is what Trump did for four years. You hard stop don't want that. You want slow, careful, and yes, missing opportunities for "immediate" action. It sucks. It's miserable to do. It's also what leadership is.

And the SecDHS? Let's say, right now, David Pekoske says Fix All This Shit. Someone beneath him will pass it along till it's someone's job to actually do something. This person will attempt to find someone to blame for, say, gassing protestors

It will be, to no one's suprise, almost impossible to figure out who specifically did it. So and so was told by such and such to carry out this and that policy w who and what. People will be "out sick"/otherwise unavailable. The basic q of "wtf is happening" will be unanswerable

This will be eventually sorted out, and then will come figuring out how to not gas protestors. It will be really hard! Do you pull out forces? Will the mayor like that? Whose job is it to update rules of engagement? Or write a directive?

BTW more protestors just got gassed

By this point anonymous leaks will be all over Washington as various people try to cover their asses/snipe at each other. You're asked about allegations that are pure distilled nonsense from who knows where. Your boss is yelling at you, your subordinates are, everyone is

You will, finally, get a few scalps to take. Some people are fired, some promoted downstairs. They will all immediately talk trash at you to every reporter within earshot. The next thing that goes wrong at DHS will be balled up with this in a multicolor disaster of cable news

And that's if it goes WELL. Just as many times it will fail completely and you will just...muddle through by rotating shifts around or something. Or some other emergency will come up.

Good government is fucking hard, and it's never going to be that satisfying