Trump's housing regulator Bill Pulte says he'll hand over intel reins to Jay Clayton on Monday

Two months. That's how long the guy who runs the housing finance agency was also, on paper, running American intelligence. Bill Pulte handing the reins to Jay Clayton on Monday closes out one of the stranger footnotes of this administration, and it's worth asking why nobody seemed especially alarmed about it while it was happening.

Part of the answer is that acting titles have become a Washington shrug. Presidents of both parties have parked people in jobs "acting" for months or years because Senate confirmation is slow and miserable, and eventually everyone just accepts the fiction. But intelligence isn't housing policy. The DNI's office exists to coordinate what the CIA, NSA and a dozen other agencies know, and to make sure the president isn't getting surprised by something his own government already understood. Having a housing regulator moonlighting in that chair for two months isn't a scandal by itself, but it's a symptom of an executive branch that treats confirmation fights as an obstacle course rather than a check worth respecting.

Clayton, a former SEC chairman, is a far more conventional and credible pick, and getting him installed is a genuine improvement. Nobody should begrudge Trump for wanting someone he trusts running the building while the Senate dawdles. But the lesson here isn't "no harm done." It's that the permanent bureaucracy of caretakers and placeholders that both parties have built over twenty years makes moments like this normal instead of notable, and that's not a compliment to how seriously Washington takes the people watching our enemies.