In just the first two weeks of July, four Senate-confirmed officials—including the chief financial officer of the Department of Energy and the undersecretary for health at the Department of Veterans Affairs—departed the Trump administration with little fanfare. They are the latest of 27 Senate-confirmed officials who have left their positions within Cabinet departments to date.
The pace of executive-branch activity through the first 18 months of the administration has been relentless enough to obscure this quieter trend: senior officials are leaving in record numbers and remarkably little public attention has followed them out the door.
Turnover like this drew constant news coverage during the first Trump administration. Then, turnover was a running story: historic levels of turnover that drove unprecedented levels of vacancies across Senate-confirmed positions. The president disputed the coverage directly, insisting that “people will always come and go… There is no chaos, only great energy!”
Despite far less coverage, turnover during the second Trump administration has surpassed even the high pace of the president’s first term. Our analysis found that:
- Twenty-seven Senate-confirmed officials within the Cabinet departments have already departed the administration. This is nearly two and a half times as many as Trump’s first administration (11) and over six times as many as the average between the George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations (4.3).
- Of those who left, the average tenure was eight months, only slightly longer than the five-month average confirmation delay to reach their position.
- As officials leave, they aren’t being replaced. Trump has made fewer nominations to Senate-confirmed posts than any president since Ronald Reagan, 91 fewer than the average between Reagan and Biden.
Rising departures and falling nominations feed the same problem: a widening set of vacant posts increasingly filled by acting officials the president can install without Senate confirmation.
Turnover without precedent
More Senate-confirmed officials within the Cabinet departments (27) have departed through the first 18 months than any recent president. Presidents George W. Bush, Obama and Biden only had one to seven departures at the same point in time, with an average of just over four (4.3). Trump’s 27 is more than six times that number.
Departed officials include three Cabinet secretaries, the heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the IRS and the Department of the Navy, two deputy secretaries, four department general counsels and three undersecretaries, among others. The departments of Health and Human Services and the Treasury stand out with four and six departures, respectively.
Though his first term was seen as turbulent regarding personnel, Trump has seen nearly two and a half times as many departures this administration as his first (11).
The 27 departures represent over one in nine (11.4%) Senate-confirmed officials within Cabinet departments. These departures also squander the time and resources it takes to find, vet and confirm officials.
The tenures of these officials were remarkably short. They waited an average of nearly five months to be confirmed and then served for only eight months. For 30% of them, the wait for confirmation was longer than the time they actually spent in the job.
A pipeline running dry
Compounding the turnover is the historic slow pace of nominations. So far into his second administration, Trump has made 578 nominations, the lowest since at least the Reagan administration and 14% fewer than the average between Reagan and Biden.
The contrast between Trump and his predecessors is even starker when examining the more recent period since the beginning of the year. Since January 1, Trump has only made 126 nominations, 30% fewer than the Reagan to Biden average.
One possible driver of the slow pace of nominations is an understaffed personnel operation. The office responsible for filling these positions, the White House Presidential Personnel Office, discloses little about its own capacity; the one public window is the White House’s annual disclosure to Congress which lists staff titles.
As of July 1, only nine White House staff members have agency or presidential personnel in their titles — five of them in their positions for less than a year. These are the people that actually do the work of slotting and shepherding candidates into government roles. At the same point, Obama, Trump in his first term and Biden had 14, 13 and 17 respectively. That leaves significantly fewer staff to recruit, vet and assist thousands of candidates through the process let alone manage and retain them once they arrive.
There is also a simpler explanation: the president prefers acting officials. In his first term, Trump said, “I like acting” because they gave him “more flexibility.” The administration might submit fewer nominations so that the president can more easily and swiftly pick who he wants to occupy the position without the Senate’s involvement or public scrutiny.
Why reform can’t wait
Further turnover, at even higher levels, should be expected as we head into the rest of the second year and beyond. Under Presidents George W. Bush through Biden, the final six months of the second year produced at least as many departures as the first 18 months combined. The third year typically brings even higher rates of turnover. The last four administrations saw turnover rates two to six times higher in year three than years one and two combined.
Turnover on this scale does not just thin the government’s leadership ranks—it concentrates power in the president. Each seat left to an acting official is one the president can fill on his own terms without the Senate’s advice and consent: no vetting, no confirmation hearing, no vote. Nor can the public always identify who holds the office. Interim officials are frequently unannounced and not publicly listed, making it difficult to know who is running an agency or office on any given day. And because acting officials rarely expect to stay in their positions for long, they focus on the near-term—deferring the long-range planning and organizational investment that require leaders who will be there to see them through.
Who may serve as an acting official, and for how long, is governed by the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. The law has ambiguities and its limits are easily circumvented. When an acting official’s statutory clock expires, agencies can keep the office running by delegating its duties to the same or another official—with no time limit and none of the constraints the Vacancies Act places on who may serve as an acting official. Reform should seek to maintain the original intent and spirit of the law and preserve the Senate’s oversight.
This is not a partisan concern — the Vacancies Act was itself a bipartisan response to presidents leaning on unconfirmed officials, and members of both parties have raised the same objections when the other side holds the White House.
Left unaddressed, more of the government will be led by officials installed without the Senate’s constitutionally required advice and consent, and it will be less able to do the work Americans depend on.
Learn more about the Government for a New Era initiative, our effort to develop reforms for a more effective, responsive and accountable government.
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