The highest number of White House staffers have left President Donald Trump's administration in the very first year, according to local media reports.
Citing the Brookings Institution that has tracked the White House turnover rates, the media reports said that 34 percent of Trump's staff were fired, resigned, or reassigned.
This figure doubled that of Ronald Reagan's 17 percent in 1981. Trump's term has seen more turnover than any previous administration including Presidents Obama and Clinton, the Institution has revealed. Twenty-one of the 61 senior staff tracked in the report either resigned, were fired or reassigned.
Brookings Institute senior fellow Kathryn Dunn-Tepas told The Wall Street Journal that besides the high rate of staff turnover, the seniority of the staff leaving the administration is "extraordinarily high."
"The first year always seems to have some missteps on staffing, often because the skills that worked well running a campaign don't always align with what it takes to run a government," she said, adding that in this case, President Trump and his administration had no experience to rule the government.
However, Trump had responded to such criticism by insisting that there was no "chaos" at the White House, telling his cabinet that they are starting from a really "good base."
Trump initially fired his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn last February, less than a month after he took office. Two senior campaign aides, Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, followed Flynn.For the first year of his administration, Trump's major accomplishments, confirmation of conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and a historic tax cut, actually came with relatively little drama. But Republicans often struggled to stay on the rails, particularly with a big pratfall on health care and repeated struggles to accomplish the very basics of governing.
Several shutdown deadlines came and went, and a default on the government's debt was averted, thanks to a momentary rapprochement with top Democrats, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer. But a promised solution to the plight of young immigrants brought to the country illegally as infants or children was delayed, while a routine reauthorization of a program providing health care to 9 million low-income kids stalled as well.
The longstanding goal of repealing "Obamacare" consumed Republicans for months. The effort squeaked through the House - after being left for dead at least once - in a process that exposed fissures in GOP ranks and whipped Democrats and their political base into a frenzy. But in the Senate, it was clear from the start that the "repeal and replace" push faced a slog, and afterward it seemed as if several moderate Republicans simply did not want to get to "yes."
