Trump keeps his staff in flux with White House musical chairs

The White House is on the cusp of negotiating another giant economic rescue package with Congress, but it’s weighing a new top congressional liaison. It’s facing numerous coronavirus-related domestic policy crises, from health care to immigration to education, yet is getting a new head of its Domestic Policy Council.

Unemployment is soaring and businesses are worried about the economic landscape even after the pandemic recedes, but the head of President Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers has not been seen much in weeks — though a former CEA chair is back in the spotlight as an unpaid adviser. And in the middle of the White House’s most high-wire messaging campaign, Trump completely remade his communications and press shop.

It all comes as Trump adjusts to his second month with a new chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to overhaul the White House team during a presidency-defining battle against the coronavirus.

The White House is seeing a historic pace of turnover among its highest-ranking aides, a musical chairs environment as the president faces his greatest leadership test and the biggest threat to his 2020 campaign. Some allies say he’ll need stability now more than ever to be able to bring the coronavirus crisis under control and preserve his shot at reelection.

Trump’s top officials — influential roles in the executive office of the president — have had a turnover rate of 86 percent since Trump took office, according to research by Brookings Institution senior fellow Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, whose work focuses on White House personnel, presidential reelection campaigns and trends in presidential travel.

In new findings, Tenpas calls the rate of turnover for 11 pandemic-related positions in the administration from Trump’s inauguration until December 2019 “extraordinary.” One of the key pandemic jobs, the deputy national security adviser, has been held by six separate Trump officials in less than three years, according to Tenpas’ research.

“When you are constantly switching parts in and out, the whole operation does not function as well,” said Chris Lu, a White House Cabinet secretary under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. “The more you do something, the better you get at it, and you also understand how all of the pieces fit together.”

A key to the Obama administration steering the nation through the crises of Hurricane Sandy, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and H1N1 was the same team working together throughout each problem — including the same Federal Emergency Management Agency director and head of the Department of Homeland Security, Lu said.

Current and former senior administration officials argue it matters less and less who surrounds the president in top jobs since he tends to rely mostly on his own instincts. Still, turnover during a pandemic can also scramble the processes for evaluating and vetting information and giving it to the president — as well as the trust that comes from working with the same people in tough situations.

“You have people learning as they go and a loss of institutional memory and history,” said one former senior administration official. “What it means is that staff, processes and particular councils and legislative affairs efforts are likely to be less important and less influential. The president does it himself in an ad hoc manner.”

“The staff turnover just exacerbates that phenomenon,” the former official added.

Since transitioning from Congress to the White House in March to become Trump’s fourth chief of staff in just over three years, Meadows moved quickly to remake the communications and press shop — long seen as a problem child to both Trump and senior adviser Jared Kushner. He installed a new press secretary, the fourth person to hold the job in 3½ years, along with a handful of aides he personally brought with him to the White House.

This week, the White House is expected to name Brooke Rollins as acting director of the Domestic Policy Council, a role that will be intimately involved in the coronavirus response efforts and also oversees key policy areas such as immigration. She forged close ties with Kushner for years working in his Office of American Innovation and was on the short list to run the council the last time the position became vacant in the fall of 2018.

The role was initially slated to go to Derek Lyons, the White House staff secretary and another ally of Kushner. Yet some Trump allies, who want a leader in the slot with strong conservative credentials, objected to the decision after POLITICO reported it earlier this month. Some conservatives believe Lyons helped to water down a key immigration executive order that came out in April by reminding the president in a large White House meeting of its opposition from top tech executives including Apple CEO Tim Cook.

Senior White House officials maintain Lyons has been key to enacting stricter border security and other immigration restrictions, and he remains a close ally of Stephen Miller, the White House’s resident immigration hawk. Lyons‘ own standing is getting upgraded instead.

“Derek does extraordinary work in his role as staff secretary. Given his large portfolio, elevating him to counselor to the president made the most sense,” Meadows, the White House chief of staff, said in a statement to POLITICO. “This is an expansive role that will put him in an additional advisory role to President Trump on a wide range of legal, policy and strategic matters.”

Top officials including Meadows are now searching for a new director of legislative affairs since the current one, Eric Ueland, is in discussions with the State Department about a top political position.

Meadows is eyeing for that legislative affairs role Ben Howard, a vice president at the Duberstein Group who previously worked for the Trump White House twice — first as a special assistant to the president and later as the deputy director for legislative affairs. Howard’s specialty on the Hill is knowing the House and working with Republicans to pass major legislation like the 2017 tax bill and the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, and the president has always appreciated Howard, whom he jokingly has called in front of congressional lawmakers “that young, brilliant guy who everyone likes.” Both Howard and the White House press office declined to comment.

One White House official said the recent turnover had not affected the coronavirus response. “The chief of staff intentionally left virtually no gaps in time in place between transitions out and transitions in so that balls weren’t dropped and things were smooth,” the official said, adding that even when officials left the West Wing, successors were named within days of the departure.

It may not matter much who ends up with the legislative affairs job — even if conservatives seem poised to fight over it — because Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is negotiating the major stimulus bills on Capitol Hill. Meadows also has told lawmakers to feel free to call him directly, and when he entered the White House, he told allies he wanted to take a large role in the White House’s relationships with the Hill.

The head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Tomas J. Philipson, has also receded from a high-profile role in the White House, according to senior administration officials — even though he specializes in health economics. Philipson never forged a strong relationship with Trump or other top players in the White House complex, and has been largely overshadowed by the return of senior adviser Kevin Hassett — a longtime D.C. economist and former CEA chair, who has a good working relationship with Trump. The White House declined to comment on the state of personnel at the CEA.

A huge part of the recent turnover has come from staffers loyal to former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney exiting the West Wing, and Meadows bringing in his own aides, a privilege typically afforded to any chief of staff.

But critics of the Trump administration, like Lu, say this is not the time to install loyalists. “I get Meadows wants his own people, but now is the wrong time to be switching people around,” Lu said. “It would not have been as much of a problem if they had not cycled through so many chiefs of staff already.”

Personnel decisions and daily meetings have long been fraught in the back-biting Trump White House. Even the coronavirus task force meetings took on a certain “Game of Thrones” vibe and triggered angst among participants and staffers, said one Republican close to the White House, who said officials never knew where they stood in Trump’s eyes and would obsess over details like the task force meeting seating charts for clues.

Now the task force is undergoing its own transition — with a focus on rebuilding the economy and finding a coronavirus vaccine — as Trump tries his best to nudge states to reopen the country.

The White House staff will likely shift again this fall if Trump wins reelection, and a new crop of aides replace the ones who have grown exhausted by the pace of working in the White House.

“In the administration in the next term, it will all change all over again,” said a second former senior administration official, with a sigh. “Why would anybody at this stage in the first term put themselves out there?”