Since Donald Trump’s second term as president began, the administration has scrambled to hollow out much of the federal government, but the number of high-profile resignations has been quite small. The Republican operation went to extraordinary lengths to ensure partisan loyalists held positions of influence, reducing the likelihood that anyone would quit in frustration.
There have been a few, however.
In May, for example, Brian Morrissey, the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, resigned over his concerns about the scandalous resolution to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS. Two months earlier, Joe Kent resigned as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center over his disagreement with the war with Iran.
A month before that, David Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department, reportedly resigned after refusing to hand Elon Musk’s lackeys the keys to the government’s entire payment system. Similarly, Michelle King, in her capacity as the acting Social Security commissioner, resigned last year after she also refused a Department of Government Efficiency request to access sensitive government records at the agency.
This week, the list got a little longer. Wired reported:
The Department of Homeland Security’s top numbers-cruncher has resigned, citing the Trump administration’s “war on immigrants” on his way out.
DHS has been a hub of controversy during the second Trump term: the ICE raids in American cities, the wild spending, the growing archipelago of detention centers, the attempts to hide data about it all. But vanishingly few officials have left the department and been openly critical of the direction it has taken. Marc Rosenblum, who served as executive director of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics and a deputy assistant secretary at the department, is one of the first.
The reporting hasn’t been independently verified by MS NOW, though Rosenblum wrote in a LinkedIn post over the weekend, “I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration. … Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”
(A DHS spokesperson said the department wouldn’t comment on personnel matters.)
Rosenblum isn’t exactly the most well-known figure at DHS, but he oversaw its entire statistics department, which put him in a unique position that kept him informed of all of DHS’s efforts.
“Marc was exactly what every American should want in a career public servant,” Luis Miranda, a top DHS spokesman during the Biden years, told Wired. “The Trump administration has governed by silencing or ignoring facts and information they believe doesn’t line up with their extreme rhetoric, and that has damaging implications, so it’s no surprise career officials whose job is transparency are unable to do those jobs.”
Whether his departure inspires others to step down and speak out remains to be seen. Watch this space.
The post DHS official resigns, cites administration’s ‘war on immigrants’ after exiting appeared first on MS NOW.
