The second Trump administration has clearly made a decision to move fast and break things. Largely gone are the establishment Republican figures and steady hands that sometimes resisted President Donald Trump during his first term. In their place are a bunch of people with less subject-matter and governmental experience but with the zeal of MAGA true believers, eager to implement Trump’s complete governmental overhaul and to bust through the traditional guardrails in the process.

The result is a very — and increasingly — sloppy first two months, by any objective measure.

The big headline Monday was that top Trump national security officials shared sensitive military plans for impending strikes on Yemen’s Houthi rebels with the editor in chief of the Atlantic. The White House confirmed to The Washington Post that the editor was inadvertently included in the messages.

The editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was added to the string of messages on Signal, an open-source encrypted messaging service. The group included the names of prominent administration figures, such as national security adviser Michael Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance, all strategizing about the impending attacks.

The messages were sent before the strikes began last weekend and previewed almost precisely when they ultimately took place.

The administration seemed to confirm that the messages Goldberg was included on were legitimate. It spun them as “a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials.”

The situation raises all kinds of issues. Among them:

• Why are officials trading such sensitive information on a platform like Signal, which doesn’t appear to be authorized for such communications?
• How is it possible that someone who wasn’t authorized to view them was included and nobody noticed?
• Given that the Signal messages were scheduled to automatically disappear after a period of time, how does that not violate federal records laws that require such communications to be preserved?
• And how does the White House square this apparent national security breach with Trump’s long-running criticisms of Hillary Clinton for using a private email server? Trump once said Clinton should be in jail, claiming she endangered national security.

All of these questions will be big ones in the hours, days and weeks ahead.

But you could certainly make an argument that something like this was a long time coming. The administration has played fast and loose with plenty of its high-profile initiatives. And it has already run into several prominent missteps with potentially serious consequences — not as serious as potentially jeopardizing war plans ahead of time, but still significant.

Just four days ago, The Post reported that the administration had made public the Social Security numbers and other private information of more than 400 people — many of them still alive — in its release of files related to the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy. There were more than 3,500 instances of Social Security numbers being left unredacted (many of them were for the same people). Such information could open those people up to identity theft or threats.

The disclosures came after officials reportedly rushed to meet a deadline imposed by Trump. One of the victims is a former lawyer for Trump, Joseph diGenova, who called the breach “outrageous,” “sloppy” and “unprofessional.”

Many of the other mistakes stem from a hasty and often unwieldy effort to cut government spending and programs.

The head of that effort, Elon Musk, recently disclosed that the administration had “accidentally canceled” anti-Ebola efforts led by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Musk said the Ebola efforts were immediately resumed with “no interruption,” but other officials told The Post that wasn’t the case.

Similarly, the administration fired employees of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a federal agency that maintains thousands of nuclear warheads. Those employees make sure radiation doesn’t leak, that the weapons don’t mistakenly detonate and that plutonium doesn’t get into the wrong hands. Almost all were soon rehired.

“I probably moved a little too quickly there, and when we made mistakes on layoffs in NNSA, we reversed them immediately, less than 24 hours,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said.

In other cases, the administration fired people who worked to contain the bird flu, as well as those who worked on food and medical device safety and provided assistance for 9/11 responders, before pulling back on at least some of those firings amid the ensuing outcries.

Last month, Hegseth previewed apparent concessions that Ukraine would have to make to Russia to reach a peace deal, before quickly walking back what he had said. Republican Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (Mississippi) called it a “rookie mistake.”

On a smaller scale, the administration also recently admitted mistakes in removing tributes to Jackie Robinson and the flag-raising at Iwo Jima (which included a Native American Marine) as part of its efforts to rid the federal government of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Earlier, the Associated Press reported that the effort had also ensnared the Enola Gay, one of two aircraft used to drop atomic bombs on Japan, presumably because the plane’s name contained the word “gay.”

And last month, the administration briefly allowed what it said was an unapproved reporter from the Russian state media organization Tass into the Oval Office, before removing the reporter.

To be sure, these kinds of episodes existed in Trump’s first term. The transition period after his first election was perhaps the most chaotic in living memory. There was the time he disclosed highly classified information to top Russian officials in the Oval Office, however intentionally. Classified records were routinely mishandled, according to White House aides.

But the first two months of his second term have brought an onslaught of apparently unforced errors — things that could seemingly have been avoided with due diligence and more emphasis on traditional processes.

And judging by what we learned Monday, we shouldn’t expect that to stop any time soon.