First, I believe that the historical approach to staffing the Presidency is flawed. Comparisons with past administrations are amusing but may have no relevance.
When a new administration arrives, it is dependent on holdovers to continue operations. Among the existing staff are highly competent and knowledgeable people for which it is wise to keep them.
For the most part, the President will want to appoint department and agency heads who are aligned with his agenda and his party's platform.
From a citizen's perspective, we want Presidents to appoint staff who will stay the course of one to two terms in office. Why is continuity important? The answer is that it is costly to recruit and hire senior staff. It is vital to have continuous management which can be held accountable for their performance. The government cycles of planning, budgeting, program initiation and implementation is at least four years with overlap among cycles and processes.
Changing staff is disruptive and evasive of responsibility and accountability. Effective executives nurture the team and keep it together. Turnover is a significant trouble symptom that management isn't performing well.
Staffing the administration is a President's first primary task, and President Trump is failing at that with grossly noticeable problems.
Members of his campaign are under arrest and indicted. His National Security Director resigned for lying to the FBI. His Attorney General has recused himself from the Russian election interference investigation.
These are nontrivial problems, and the press is correct to call Trump on the carpet for his ineffective leadership. They are the citizens' voice.
The New Yorker addressed the situation this way. (Way too wordy.)
"Staff departures have been a constant of Donald Trump’s first year in the White House. Michael Flynn has put in a guilty plea. Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and Anthony Scaramucci were pushed out. Sean Spicer is off working on a book. Omarosa Manigault, the former contestant on “The Apprentice” whom Trump installed in the Office of Public Liaison, was reportedly fired, on Tuesday. In September, Politico reported that “a fast-growing number of White House staffers” were updating their résumés, making lunch dates with headhunters and prospective employers, and counting the days until 2018. “There will be an exodus from this administration in January,” one Republican lobbyist told Politico. It has already been confirmed that Dina Powell, the deputy national-security adviser, will leave the White House early next year and that Paul Winfree, the deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and the director of budget policy, will head back to his old job at the Heritage Foundation after this week. Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, has signaled that he will leave the Administration once the fate of the Republican tax bill is decided.
This degree of churn is “off the charts,” according to Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has spent years tracking White House turnover rates. Next month, Tenpas will release her findings about Trump’s first year in office. The data—some of which she shared with me this week—is striking: even if every one of Trump’s senior aides stays put until January 20th, the anniversary of his Inauguration, his first-year turnover rate among top staff—some sixty positions in total—will reach or exceed thirty-three percent. Turnover, as Tenpas defines it, includes resignations, firings, and shifts of opinion within the White House. Trump’s first-year turnover rate will be three times higher than both Barack Obama’s (nine percent) and Bill Clinton’s (eleven percent) and double Ronald Reagan’s (seventeen percent), which is as far back as Tenpas’s analysis goes. And this, almost certainly, is just the beginning. Every one of the past five Presidencies saw a massive jump in departures during its second year: typically, the rate more than doubles as staff burnout intensifies, legislative initiatives bog down in Congress, and midterm elections, almost inevitably, deal a setback to the President’s party.
Turnover isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Trump traded up when he hired John Kelly to replace the ineffectual Priebus as chief of staff and H. R. McMaster to succeed Flynn at the helm of the National Security Council. But the coming and going of key players have a cost. When senior staff members leave, institutional knowledge leaves with them. Valuable relationships—with members of Congress, state officials, or interest groups—can be weakened or lost. Junior staff members are often left without a sponsor, a portfolio, or clear direction. During his campaign, Trump often promised to run the White House like a business, but few C.E.O.s would accept or survive, a level of staff attrition as high as this Presidents.
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It began almost immediately.
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