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Notes -
...le sigh, that is not a stupid question, but it is not a simple answer either, but I feel obliged to elaborate.
And so, let us explore the nuances and limitations of dual-hatting institutional positions. And also how USAID was dismantled under a dual-hat institutional takeover, but not by DOGE.
Part 1: Can the Chief Executive of the United States be Middle Management of the Executive Branch?
Yes, but really no. The biggest issue preventing Trump from taking other administrator posts is that he already has too much to do to take another full-time job.
A senior leader holding a middle manager job would make things simpler in the same sense that things would get simpler if your boss was fired so that your boss's boss became yours and every other team leader's direct supervisor. The issue with that is that the middle-manager exists for a reason. A lot of reasons, really, those reasons being to take care of things so that the higher manager doesn't have to. That why the middle manager exists, and is delegated the authorities needed.
If you replace the middle manager with a senior leader you have the senior leader to take all the roles of the middle manager- which in turn distracts them from the already very busy schedules of a senior leader. This isn't a problem that can be delegated away either, since if you delegate roles and responsibilities, you are just re-creating the middle manager job.
It's not that executives can't micro-manage things. A leader can often increase or decrease delegated authorities, refusing to delegate things they want to approve personally. The issue is that doing so takes time that cannot be spent on other things.
At which point, rather than take the middle manager's role, you could just delegate necessary authorities downward to the person already in the job. But if you were willing to do that, you wouldn't need to dual-hat in the first place.
So the thing preventing the President from holding other posts is that he doesn't want to, nor does he have to. If he wanted to empower people, he could delegate the authority to do so- or have someone else hold down two jobs.
Part 2: What is Dual Hatting?
Dual-hatting refers to the practice of having one person hold two institutional leadership roles at the same time. This often in terms of having a primary job and a secondary job, but with the two jobs existing in different institutional leadership roles, each supported by different staffs and institutional support networks.
I.E., if you Dual Hated the Department of Education and Department of Sanitation, the dual-hatted department head would have the institutional expertise of janitors on one hand, and education on the other.
Dual-hatting is, in turn, typically for horizontal integration purposes, rather than vertical. While it exists to allow for some vertical hierarchical 'shared boss,' it is doing so to facilitate cooperation between non-hierarchical institutions, who may not be 'equals' but are not formally subordinate. If they were, you could just issue orders downward to be followed.
But, again, senior leaders in government are often very busy if they are taking their jobs seriously, and often even if they are not (since they are doing funner things instead). Dual hatting a leader means the leader has to sit in the necessary meetings for both organizations, which is easily double the time. Which, in turn, leaves them less time to do the other things of either role.
As a result, dual-hatting is generally reserved for senior leaders and decision makers / approvers where two institutions must coordinate, but need to do so fast enough / avoid potential personality conflicts of two different people. So if Institution A has a policy effort that Institution B must approve and support, Head of Institution A directs A to Do The Thing, and then puts on their other hat and Approves Agency A's proposal in the position of Agency B and then directs Institution B subordinates to support.
A dual-hatted leader of both institutions can force cooperation / approve exceptions on behalf of both, without the issues / tradeoffs of merging the two institutions, which may not be politically possible, or even desirable.
Part 3: Why would you dual hat leaders? (Aside from leader bandwidth)
Other than the ability of someone to lead two institutions, dual hatting is generally done for fundamentally distinct institutions that aren't / can't / shouldn't be merged into a single institution.
These may be very distinct focus organizations that have very different needs and purposes but need to work together (a joint force of police and firefighters working to manage a city response to a major fire approaching; one group handles fires and the other people), subtly distinct organizations in the same supra-organization (Ministry of Military and Ministry of Police; both have guns and work for the same government ), or even organizations from completely different allegiances (City versus State versus National government employees working on Olympic Games security).
An example of this is multi-national military coalitions. If Country A is the leader of the coalition and gets to be the Commander, the Deputy Commander will often be one of the key secondary contributors, Country B. Both the Coalition Commander and Deputy Commanders, in turn, will probably be dual-hatted commanders of their respective component forces, since Country A wants its military reporting to its officer, and Country B wants its military reporting to its officer.
What this mean is that Coalition-Commander is Commander-Country A, and Coalition-Deputy-Commander is Commander-Country B. This, in turn, means Country A's military second-in-command (Deputy Commander of Country A forces) can't boss around the coalition B second-in-command, or vice versa, letting their respective command staffs work both in isolation (Country B running Country B's staff) and in coordination (Country A and Country B staffs working together for the Coalition) as appropriate. Country B is doing work for Country A not because Commander A said so, but because Commander B said to help Country A.
This may sound confusing, but it saves the headache of Country A having to conquer / annex / integrate Country B into Country A every time they want to have a coalition.
Now work that back to government agencies, and now you're not having the Minister of Police and Minister of Spies subsume one or the other each time they work together. Instead, they each designate someone to represent their ministry, and dual hat them in some way so they can are empowered in the joint effort and in their own contribution to the effort.
This could be a Joint Police - Spy counter-terrorism task force, where Dual Hatted police officer can order police elements, and Dual Hatted spy officer can order spy elements, without having to give your Minister of Spies control of the national police, or vice versa, neither of which you want to do in case someone gets ideas for creative combinations of these two parts of government. These arrangements are typically short, tactical, and mission-focused rather than shaping eachother's internal activities.
Part 4: Why Can't DOGE Dual Hat as the Secretary of [Whatever]?
Because Trump has appointed other people instead.
Since Trump can't credibly be the middle management (since it's the middle management), dual hatting would be between DOGE/Musk and whoever the agency in question is. This is where things start to make this a non-solution for Musk and DOGE, since this is where Congress starts to have a say.
In the US, a lot of the major departments of the government have Congressionally-approved heads, with the authorities of the agency explicitly delegated by Congress to the head of the agency or a specific position in the agency. For example- Congress gives authorities to the Department of Justice, and different authorities to the head of the FBI within the Department of Justice. To formally use those powers you need to be the Congressionally-approved person, or the interim actor.
Now, Interim/Acting directors aren't impossible. There are legal ambiguities on how much they can actually do without being confirmed, but it's not unknown for agencies to operate with Acting heads for long periods. This was even somewhat common in the last trump administration.
The issue is that even if you want to work from the position of being the Acting Director, you have to be the butt in the seat. And, as is becoming clear with the OPM emails, DOGE and the other Trump appointees are not one and the same.
For DOGE to dual hat as the secretary of [whatever], DOGE either needs to- (a) have one of its own get appointed as an Acting Director, or (b) recruit a sitting director to join them, giving Dual Hat authority in the reverse. And since part of the purpose of DOGE is to gut agencies, (b) is a hard sell.
Since Trump has appointed other people, and not DOGE, to these senior positions, it's safe to say Trump won't be firing them solely for not going along with DOGE.
What this means is that you won't have a dual-hat where DOGE+Musk are now the Secretary of Whatever. Instead, you have to have a dual hat relationship between DOGE and Department.
Part 5: Why is Dual Hatting a not the best idea anyway for DOGE?
The value of dual hatting really comes from well-defined institutional authorities, where Party A knows what they can/cannot do with regards to Party B, and vice versa. That way, the dual-hat position can be scoped in a way that both Parties agree to work together. After all, if the proposal was 'under this agreement, Party A can run Party B,' you might as well unify the institutions. You are only dual-hatting because you can't / won't.
The issue with DOGE and Musk is that it rests on ill-defined institutional authorities. No one knows what DOGE can or cannot do, because it has no defined powers outside of 'doing it on behalf of the President.'
This is very powerful in some respects. Presidents have a lot of authority to do what they prefer in the executive branch, when it's not otherwise mandated by law how they can / cannot do things. It also provides institutional leverage, because since no one knows what DOGE can't do, you aren't certain how much you must / cannot afford not to do.
But it also means that- absent any formal authority of DOGE to do certain things over a Department's will, it can only do said things with the authorities of the Department it is borrowing the hat of.
And this is where dual hatting does NOT solve the challenge of letting DOGE do whatever DOGE wants to do, because the dual-hatted position in the institution doesn't necessarily have the ability DOGE wants.
Part 6: What are the limits of dual-hatting?
Ultimately, the additional hat from dual hatting does not allow a leader to do things that were already forbidden, including overruling their boss of the new (or old) hat.
The Secretary of State, for example, does not have the legal authority to disband the Department of State and sell all the Embassies for pennies or other things. (This would require Congressional authorization, which has regulated restrictions for how the government can offload certain properties, to avoid corruption abuse.) Which means DOGE taking over the Secretary of State hat wouldn't allow DOGE to sell embassies either.
Which means the authority to do what the State Department couldn't would have to come from... DOGE. But if DOGE it had the authority independent of the State Department to sell the Embassies for pennies, it wouldn't need to dual hat to do so.
Further, the Secretary of State and similar positions are Congressionally confirmed positions. Which is to say, DOGE can't dual-hat as them without Senate approval. And if they dual hat as someone below the Secretary- say dual hat as the deputy Secretary of Defense- then the Deputy could be overruled by the Secretary, who has the authorities to overrule their Deputy as a matter of course.
And if the DOGE could already overrule the Secretary of State, they wouldn't need the dual hat from a subordinate of the Secretary.
Which, again, limits the value of the dual hat to what powers DOGE has independently, since any Department-gutting decision they can make can be overruled by the Secretary of the Department they are trying to gut.
Part 7: How do dual hats form?
Dual Hats are generally either appointed by a higher leader or negotiated between leaders.
If you have appointment power over a position, then dual hatting is as simple as appoint someone already in a position to take over the position. This is sometimes done as an interim / emergency measure, say that the Director of Y gets into a car crash, and so Administrator X appoints Director Z to take over the leadership position until a longer-term replacement is made. In this case, the dual hatting is temporary, and often disruptive, but just a matter of appointment.
If you do not have directive power- and DOGE does not have hiring or firing power over the rest of the government- you negotiate between institutions. And since the negotiations require consent- since if you had the authorities you wouldn't need the new hat- you are also negotiating limits.
This is why Dual Hat relationships are usually a result of negotiations between both institutional parties (governments, agencies, directorates, etc.), with pretty explicit Can Do This caveats where- if it is not agreed upon, it is not assumed to be conceeded. Whether that's governments defining the scope of how much influence the coalition commander has over other coalition members, or the limits of the authorities of the new-hat position. No one is going to sign over their budget to an outsider, give them control over hiring or promotions or so on. The potential for abuse (we chose to give ourselves bonuses with your budget) makes these non-starters.
And in such a negotiation, DOGE has a very weak hand, despite its implicit access to Presidential powers.
Implicit presidential support is not enough to dictate terms of a joint position, since the departments are also exercising implicit and even explicit executive and legislated legal authorities. Further, the dual-hated's authorities cannot exceed the Congressionally-supported Secretary who can veto it. At which point, DOGE / Musk either accepts the veto, or has to appeal to Trump to fire Trump's own appointee implementing Trump's own vision for the department.
Which means that- unless until Trump gives explicit support siding with DOGE over Department- DOGE can only negotiate for a Dual Hat role with what the Department is willing to concede. And here DOGE has little to offer, and seeks to take away much.
Which is why USAID offers a different dual hat model.
Part 8: How Dual Hat Destroyed USAID
In a policy sense, DOGE did not destroy USAID. The State Department is, through the power of the dual hat to wear USAID as a skinsuit.
What DOGE did was use its implicit presidential powers to set conditions for dismissal of existing USAID leaders to open up the appointment space for a State Department takeover, knowing it would have Congressional cover against blowback to pre-empt a judicial freeze.
The start of the USAID's dismantling was the attempt by senior USAID officials to block the DOGE from accessing USAID networks. This is the sort of context where DOGE's ambiguous but implicit presidential powers worked to its advantages, because when challenged Trump backed them.
While there is a legal argument that DOGE should not be allowed onto agency networks, especially classified ones, this is also where the role of Presidential powers allowing the President to pick sides comes into play. Ultimately, with a very narrow exception on Congressionally-mandated classification of things like nuclear secrets, the vast majority of American national security information belongs to the President. He can declassify at will, without prior approval or permission from anyone else. He also has basically unlimited access- and can bestow that access in turn- and no laws allow even independent executive branch agencies to deny the President access to His information, which entails his designated oversight agents. When Executive Agents A say the President requires them to do A (deny information to actor B), and Executive Agent B says the President requires them to do B (access information on behalf of the President), the President gets a say who is right... and who is obstructing his authority.
So when senior USAID leaders on a Sunday tried to physically bar DOGE from accessing USAID facilities and servers, it was they, and not DOGE, that were escorted from the building. And for trying to stop the chief executive oversight- which might or might not hypothetically lose them the trust and confidence of the President of United States required for the access to classified information required for their job- they were put on leave.
But if Senior Leaders are on leave, there is a need for new leaders- even if 'only' acting in the interim.
So when the events of 2 February opened up some gaps in USAID, on 3 February experienced government G-Man Marco Rubio was appointed as the Acting-Director of USAID, at least until a more permanent leader could be designated and approved by Congress. And by 4 February, was delegating USAID internal authorities to new leaders, including substantiative internal reorganizations.
That G-Man Acting Director Marco Rubio started federal service less than two weeks prior and happened to also be the formally approved Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was in the process of making his own appoints in the State Department as he asserted control of his new organization- no, the other one- is an example of dual-hatting.
If you are starting to wonder is maybe the new Acting Director Rubio is approving / appointing people selflessly proposed by Secretary State Rubio to help with USAID functions- people who may themselves be dual-hatting as Secretary of State and USAID roles at the same time- you're starting to see the power, and the threat, of dual-hat without limitations.
In part, these limitations don't exist for USAID because Congress has never legislated an internal structure dynamic to USAID. Unlike requiring the Department of Defense to have a certain number of military services, there is no similar requirement for USAID to be structured in certain ways. So while USAID is an 'independent agency' of sorts that can't be 'formally' absorbed by the State Department, there's nothing preventing the Administrator of USAID from reorganizing USAID to a 1-to-1 map of the state department organization chart to facilitate USAID-State Department cooperation, and incorporating dual-hat relationships that coincidentally make the leader of every USAID element a dual-hatted State Department appointee.
This is also comes with a bonus that it avoids significant legal issues on cross-department money spending. It would be Very Illegal for a State Department Employee to handle the USAID money.
But a USAID employee? Not so much. Just make sure you wear the right hat at the time.
This is why the 'save the USAID' lawsuits have instead focused on the freeze of grants in general, rather than the reorganization or who is making the call. But this is both getting into the nature of the grant-approval process- which, like with Classification, is not above review by the Chief Executive, and the fact that the consequence of a refusal to spend is less about the courts (who have very little ability to force the Executive to do a thing compared to issuing a bar to not do it) and more about Congress.
Whose main leverage is the power of the purse to cut off funds to the government if they are displeased.
But is currently controlled by a party that are is particularly displeased, with a minority party that would be displeased regardless
And who haven't even passed a full budget for the fiscal year, which could in turn happen to remove all those unspent funds anyway.
And who- even if they pass a budget demanding funds be spent on projects approved by USAID approvers, are over the next two years likely to find that the USAID approvers have relocated to State Department offices in desks that have a hat rack.
Is it a bureaucratic skin suit? Sure. Is it illegal? Not the reorganization part, at least.
But- notably- at none of these steps did DOGE dual-hat. DOGE was just checking in on things on behalf of the President.
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