Most members of President Donald Trump's Cabinet do not yet have leadership teams in place or even nominees for top deputies. But they do have an influential coterie of senior aides installed by the White House who are charged - above all - with monitoring the secretaries' loyalty, according to eight officials in and outside the Administration.
These advisers have offices in or just outside the secretary's suite.
The White House has installed at least 16 of the advisers at departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and at some smaller agencies such as Nasa, according to records first obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request.
These aides report not to the secretary, but to Rick Dearborn, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, according to Administration officials. A top Dearborn aide, John Mashburn, leads a weekly conference call with the advisers, who are in constant contact with the White House.
The aides act as a go-between on policy matters for the agencies and the White House. Behind the scenes, though, they're on another mission: to monitor Cabinet leaders and their top staffs to make sure they carry out the President's agenda and don't stray too far from the White House's talking points, said several officials with knowledge of the arrangement.
"Especially when you're starting a government and you have a changeover of parties when policies are going to be dramatically different, I think it's something that's smart," said Barry Bennett, a former Trump campaign adviser.
"Somebody needs to be there as the White House's man on the scene. Because there's no senior staff yet, they're functioning as the White House's voice and ears in these departments."
The arrangement is unusual. It wasn't used by Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush or Bill Clinton.
And it's also different from the traditional liaisons who shepherd the White House's political appointees to the various agencies.
Critics say the competing chains of command eventually will breed mistrust, chaos and inefficiency - especially as new department heads build their staffs.
"It's healthy when there is some daylight between the President's Cabinet and the White House, with room for some disagreement," said Kevin Knobloch, who was chief of staff under Obama to then-Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
"That can only happen when agency secretaries have their own team, who report directly to them," he said. "Otherwise it comes off as not a ringing vote of confidence in the Cabinet."
The White House declined to comment about the appointees on the record, citing the confidentiality of personnel matters and internal operations.
But a White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, contested their mission of holding agencies accountable and said they technically report to each department's chief of staff or to the secretaries themselves.
"The advisers were a main point of contact in the early transition process as the agencies were being set up," the official said in an email. "Like every White House, this one is in frequent contact with agencies and departments."
The Trump Log
•Donald Trump's grasp of Nato was questioned after he claimed Germany owed the alliance and the United States "vast sums of money". The President had said in a tweet on Sunday that "the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defence it provides to Germany". German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said yesterday that "there is no debt account at Nato". She added: "Defence spending also goes into UN peacekeeping missions, into our European missions and into our contribution to the fight against Isis terrorism." Nato - the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - is an alliance of Western countries which have agreed to defend each other against an attack from an external threat.
•A former British ambassador to the US has warned the White House that it is playing a "dangerous game" over claims Barack Obama used Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency to spy on Donald Trump. Sir Peter Westmacott, writing in the Guardian, said officials in the Administration were "peddling falsehoods" which risked damaging the US-UK intelligence-sharing relationship in a way that was a "gift to our enemies".
