White House staff turnover in Trump administration highest in decades

The chaos and distrust inside Donald Trump’s White House, where loyalty is valued more than competence, has led to a staff turnover rate of 34 per cent rate - a level of human churn that has not been seen for decades.

Every administration suffers from a revolving door of personnel, given the unique pressures and reality of burnout that comes from working inside a pressure cooker atmosphere with little parallel.

But as the White House experiences a fresh flurry of departures - just last Friday a deputy chief of stood down, one speech writer resigned, the associate Attorney General quit and Mr Trump’s Chief-of-Staff offered to leave - experts say the departure of senior staff experienced by Mr Trump is greater that an least his five most recent predecessors.

“I find Trump’s turnover is record-setting, more than triple that of [Barack] Obama and double that of [Ronald] Reagan,” Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, wrote in a recent report.

“In looking at why Trump has experienced such high turnover, I argue he has valued loyalty over qualifications and suffered from a White House that has functioned in a chaotic manner. Both features have made it difficult to retain staff.”

She added: “If history is any guide, staff recruitment and retention during his second year could prove challenging as well.”

While the public may imagine it knows what it may be to work in the White House, given the glut of movies and television series about life there, many who have worked for an administration say it is unlike anything they had experienced before or after.

Mike McCurry, who worked as Bill Clinton’s press secretary from December 1994 to August 1998, told The Independent there was “no greater high on earth” than driving to the West Wing, parking your car and going to work.

He said most press secretaries averaged 2.8 years; he received a bonus year because he was kept on to deal with the fallout of the Monica Lewinsky scandal..

“I walked out of the one State Dinner I ever attended - Tony Blair’s in 1998 - only to asked by [the late Peter Jennings of ABC] about a “blue dress compromised the president’s semen”,” he said.

“I had to put Mrs McCurry in a cab so I could go back to work. Those are the highs and lows of working at the White House.”

As for the higher than usual turnover of staff experienced by the Trump administration, Mr McCurry said he was not surprised that people were leaving in such numbers.

“Trump breaks all moulds of convention and regular order when it comes to how presidencies actually operate,” he said. “It must be exhausting for those who work there and I would pity them, except they signed up to work for this guy whom they knew would not conduct himself according to the normal conventions and protocol.”

Dee Dee Myers, who make history by becoming the first woman to serve as a White House press secretary and preceded Mr McCurry, told Forbes there are a “tremendous amount of issues”.

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Ms Myers, who is now head of corporate communications for Warner Brothers, added: “The president’s portfolio is always so broad, and there is always something happening. There is always some piece of it that is moving really fast. There was a broad range of complex issues, and of course the stakes were high.”

Ari Fleischer, who served in the same role for George W Bush, hinted at the pressures of the job when he announced he was sending down shortly before the president’s reelection campaign gathered pace in 2003. “I want to do something more relaxing — like dismantle live nuclear weapons,” he said.

Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who served as Mr Clinton’s Energy secretary, told the HuffPost, that many staff suffered from burn out.

“No one asked you, ‘How’s your family?’ — just, ‘Be there,’” Mr Richardson said. “You think you’d make it home on time for dinner? Forget it, you’d never make it.”

And it’s not just the most recent presidents. Clark Clifford, who served five years in the Truman White House, once said of the 1948 campaign: “After that, I knew I would have to go. I was about as exhausted as a human being could get.“

Among the senior staff who have already left of been pushed out of the Trump administration White House, are press secretary Sean Spicer, chief strategist Stephen Bannon, Mr Trump’s first chief of staff Reince Priebus, his deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh, deputy national security adviser KT McFarland, adviser Sebastian Gorka and deputy national security Dina Powell.

A number of others such national security adviser Michael Flynn and communications director Anthony Scaramuccci where fired outright.

The most recent senior member of staff to leave was staff secretary, Rob Porter, who resigned as it was revealed that his two ex-wives accused him of domestic abuse. The White House has failed to yet convincingly provide a timeline of what it knew exactly about the allegations leveled at Mr Porter, which he denies, and when.

Ms Tenpas, of Brookings, believes that in addition to the pressures facing all administrations, the record-breaking turnover experienced during Mr Trump’s first term, may have related to two important factors - the sense of chaos what appeared to grip the West Wing and the President’s “focus on loyalty over qualifications”

“Since the President relied on many of his connections in the private sector and was reluctant to hire those who opposed him during the campaign, the absence of prior White House experience among the ranks of the senior staff was glaring.

“While it created new opportunities for many individuals who had not previously worked in the White House, such inexperience may have led to poor performance and a slew of first-year departures.”

Ms Tenpas said if history is a guide, the issue of staff leaving and the struggle to recruit good replacements is likely to worsen in the remaining years of Mr Trump’s term. The specter of Robert Mueller’s probe into possible collision between the Trump campaign and Russia will also be a factor.

”Perhaps the real story this coming year may well be the other side of the turnover coin: filling these senior staff vacancies,” she wrote.

“Year-two recruitment is more of a challenge for any administration because the post-election enthusiasm has long since faded, the “first string” recruits have been tapped out, and the harsh realities of governing are in full view.”