# Chad Wolf **Chad Wolf** was acting Secretary of Homeland Security from November 2019 to January 2021. He is the clearest case in the vault of an official who held a cabinet job for fourteen months that courts and the GAO later said he never lawfully held. He was a lobbyist before government and became a movement-think-tank executive after. ## Career A former Senate aide, Wolf worked at the [[TSA]] after 9/11. From 2005 to 2016 he was a vice president at the lobbying firm Wexler & Walker, where his clients included companies seeking TSA business. He came back in 2017 as TSA chief of staff, then became chief of staff to DHS Secretary [[Kirstjen Nielsen]]. The Senate confirmed him as under secretary for policy on Nov. 13, 2019, and he became acting secretary the same day. ## Family separation In 2019 testimony he told Sen. Jacky Rosen he had not helped develop the [[Family Separation Policy]]. Documents obtained by the watchdog group Restore Public Trust showed that in December 2017, as Nielsen's chief of staff, he sent the Justice Department a list of options that included announcing DHS was "considering separating family units." The group asked the Justice Department to investigate whether he had misled the committee. ## The invalid tenure Wolf's claim to the job ran through a chain of succession orders. When Nielsen resigned in April 2019, CBP commissioner Kevin McAleenan took over as acting secretary. McAleenan later amended the succession order to put Wolf next in line. On **Aug. 14, 2020**, the [[Government Accountability Office]] concluded that Nielsen's own order had not made McAleenan her lawful successor. If McAleenan was never lawfully acting, his amendment was void, and so were Wolf's appointment and his deputy [[Ken Cuccinelli]]'s. Federal district courts reached the same conclusion. In November 2020 a Brooklyn judge voided Wolf's order suspending new [[DACA]] applications. Trump formally nominated him in September 2020, but the full Senate never voted, and Trump withdrew the nomination on Jan. 6, 2021. Wolf resigned on Jan. 11, 2021, citing "meritless court rulings." See [[Federal Vacancies Reform Act]]. ## What he did with the job - **Portland, summer 2020.** He sent federal tactical teams to protect federal property during the [[George Floyd Protests 2020]]. Unmarked agents pulling protesters into vans became the defining image of DHS as a domestic political force. - **Intelligence.** In September 2020, DHS intelligence official Brian Murphy filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Wolf told him to stop reporting on Russian election interference and to emphasize China and Iran instead. DHS denied it. - **Immigration.** He oversaw the asylum restrictions and DACA suspension that the invalid-appointment rulings later knocked out. ## After He co-founded a consulting firm with other Trump DHS veterans and was a Heritage visiting fellow. In March 2025, when the [[America First Policy Institute]]'s founders went into the Cabinet ([[Brooke Rollins]] among them), Wolf became its **executive vice president and chief strategy officer**. AFPI is the policy shop meant to outlast Trump, the "100-year plan." Wolf described it as the "outside support system" for a movement "which is now inside government." ## See also - [[Trump 1.0 Cabinet Hub]] · [[First Trump Administration]] · [[Department of Homeland Security]] - [[Federal Vacancies Reform Act]] · [[Ken Cuccinelli]] · [[Kirstjen Nielsen]] - [[Family Separation Policy]] · [[George Floyd Protests 2020]] · [[Climate Migration]] - [[America First Policy Institute]] · [[David Bernhardt]]