Nearly two months since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration still can’t find its sea legs and is increasingly beset with internal strife and suspicion. “A culture of paranoia is consuming the Trump administration, with staffers increasingly preoccupied with perceived enemies—inside their own government,” Politico reported on Wednesday. An unending wave of leaks to the press, often in the service of factional feuds, has led to an increasingly dysfunctional White House. “Aides are going to great lengths to protect themselves. They’re turning off work-issued smartphones and putting them in drawers when they arrive home from work out of fear that they could be used to eavesdrop. They’re staying mum in meetings out of concern that their comments could be leaked to the press by foes.”

Yet the leaks, infighting, and paranoia are merely symptomatic of a deeper problem: President Donald Trump’s failure to fill countless key positions as he presides over “the slowest transition in decades.” While he claims these jobs remain unfilled by design, the real reason is that Trump is a political neophyte and ideological outsider—neither of which are likely to change in the near term. That portends, in the longer term, a dysfunctional government and bunkered White House that lead to Trump’s undoing.

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is fond of the adage that “personnel is policy.” In the Trump administration, personnel is also the problem. Trump and Bannon have a radical “America first” agenda that puts them at odds with many in their own party and also in the bureaucracy: They favor an extremely restrictionist immigration policy, a protectionist trade policy, and a foreign policy that abandons old alliances in favor of unorthodox new partnerships, notably with Russia. To fully implement this agenda, they need to staff the administration with loyalists. But their difficulty in finding enough qualified loyalists has led them to rely on more mainstream figures, while also leaving many positions unfilled.

Trump and Bannon are generals without enough lieutenants, unable to recruit the enough ideological loyalists because their network simply isn’t large enough. “Trump’s worldview is in a tiny minority within his own administration,” Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institute wrote this week at Politico Magazine. “His national security team is primarily composed of people who want to maintain U.S. alliances, an open global economy and support for universal values. The reason why Trump ended up with such a team is, in part, because there are no think tanks or academic cabals that are working out how to translate his visceral beliefs into policy...Whether it was by intent or design, the effect of his choice was to voluntarily surrender the bureaucracy to ideological opponents of his America First worldview.”

Although they’ve granted power to mainstream figures like Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Trump and Bannon still want to control hiring at a lower level, to shore up their power with as many loyalists as possible. This has caused many clashes over personnel. When McMaster tried to remove Ezra Cohen-Watnick (a protege of Michael Flynn, the president’s short-lived national security adviser, and a perceived Trump loyalist) from a key position on the National Security Council, he was overruled by Bannon and senior adviser Jared Kushner. To date, Mattis is Trump’s only appointment to the Pentagon because the defense secretary has been roadblocked by Trump loyalist Mira Ricardel, who “has been a vital part of the nominee review process,” according to DefenseNews.