Report: Turnover rate in Trump White House highest in decades

President Trump’s White House has reportedly seen the highest turnover rate among its staff in decades. 

The New York Times reported that staff departures at the White House have reached 34 percent, following a number of high-profile shake-ups and resignations among some of the president’s most senior aides.

At the same time, Trump has struggled to fill vacant positions, largely reflecting the president’s unwillingness to hire those that he deems disloyal, as well as hesitations by some Republicans to join an administration that often appears chaotic and freewheeling, the Times reported. 

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Some among Trump’s staff are working more than one job, the newspaper noted. Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, for example, is simultaneously charged with leading the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Meanwhile, other officials have struggled with how to leave the White House without appearing disloyal, the Times added. 

“We have vacancies on top of vacancies,” Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Times. “You have initial vacancies, you have people who left in the first year and now you have people who are leaving in the second year.”

The report came days after two White House aides resigned last week amid domestic abuse allegations. 

White House chief of staff John Kelly also reportedly offered to resign as he faced scrutiny for his handling of allegations against one of those aides, staff secretary Rob Porter.

Among the other top aides to leave the White House over the past year are White House press secretary Sean Spicer, chief strategist Stephen Bannon and Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus. 

Others were ousted from the White House amid controversy, including Trump’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn, who left after it was revealed that he misled Vice President Pence and others about his contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. during the presidential transition. He has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those contacts.

Anthony Scaramucci was also ousted last summer following a brief tenure as White House communications director. That came to an end after he gave an off-the-rails interview to the New Yorker in which he spoke bombastically and vulgarly about other White House staffers.