San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
President’s banner year of firing indiscriminately
It’s fitting that our first reality-television presidency stars enough actors to be considered for an Emmy. President Trump’s administration now includes an acting attorney general and an acting Environmental Protection Agency administrator, soon to be joined by acting defense and interior secretaries and an acting White House chief of staff.
The recent designation of an acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, typifies the cumulative challenges of the administration’s tendency toward transience. Unlike Cabinet and other positions requiring Senate approval, the chief of staff serves at the president’s discretion and therefore does not normally require acting designations. But Mulvaney was brought on after a series of candidates turned down the opportunity, so to speak, to succeed John Kelly, the visibly beleaguered Marine general whose service in Iraq didn’t seem to prepare him for the Trump White House.
Perhaps because of the dwindling number of willing candidates for administration positions, Mulvaney, like Kelly and many other Trump appointees, will be drawn from another key post. He is the current director of the Office of Management and Budget and, until this month, also served as acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Such rounds of managerial musical chairs cause cascades of additional vacancies and acting capacities.
Asked on CNN about the jarring recent exit of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who resigned in protest over Trump’s abrupt decisions to withdraw troops from Syria and draw down forces in Afghanistan, White House adviser Stephen Miller shouted that turnover is “normal” at the midpoint of a presidential term. That is true, but the Trump administration’s hemorrhaging of human resources is extraordinary even in the context of typical Washington churn.
Almost two-thirds of the most important White House positions have changed hands during Trump’s first two years, according to a Brookings Institution study tracking administration personnel changes. That is significantly more than any of the past five administrations saw as of the two-year mark, and it approaches or exceeds the levels they saw after four years. Although the report doesn’t count multiple departures from the same position, some of this White House’s top jobs have turned over more than once. The president is on his third national security adviser, for example, and his fifth communications director. Employment in Cabinet-level positions has been similarly precarious compared with Trump’s recent predecessors, with more than half of those officials having left their jobs over the past two years. That is at least twice the rate of the past three administrations at the midpoint of their first terms, and it already beats all of them for Cabinet-level turnover over an entire term.
Trump made himself a TV fixture by firing people, and the connection between his show and his administration became explicit when Omarosa Manigault Newman earned the dubious distinction of being fired from both “The Apprentice” and the White House. The practice certainly generated ratings for the former and maintains an unprecedented and morbid fascination with the latter. With federal operations paralyzed at home and alliances frayed abroad, the unending exodus is also both a symptom and a cause of creeping chaos.