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Trump’s Cabinet has become severe headache for his White House

The president who promised an all-star cast instead faces the highest Cabinet turnover in recent history.

President Donald Trump has called his Cabinet “one of the finest group of people ever assembled.” He’s praised the team’s “tremendous amount of talent,” and during his 2016 campaign, he promised to hire only “the best people.”

In practice, his Cabinet has been a severe headache for White House officials since the inauguration — from its high turnover to its multiple ethics scandals to its raft of ineffective leaders, who often were unable to manage the large bureaucracies of the federal government.

The personnel chaos is now thwarting the administration’s ability to execute the president’s policy agenda in his final opportunities before an election year. When the president walks into his scheduled Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday, four of the 23 people at the table will be officials operating in an “acting“ capacity — including the leaders of Homeland Security and Defense. The secretary of Labor is slated to leave the administration on Friday, adding another temporary aide to the top ranks of the Trump administration.

And in recent weeks, a handful of the top Cabinet officials have irritated either Trump or key White House officials including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar — with the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats reportedly on the outs as well.

Nine Cabinet officials have left the Trump administration since 2017 — either through resignations or by firing — giving it the highest turnover in recent history, according to data from the Brookings Institution. The Obama administration did not have any turnover in its Cabinet in the first two years, according to the Brookings data.

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Of the many challenges facing anyone trying to understand Donald Trump’s presidency is the fact that it is maddeningly nonlinear, lurching several times each day between policy objectives that may be dictated by a Fox News anchor, a friend from Mar-a-Lago, or the prime minister of Norway. This was especially true in the first six months of his administration, when the chief political strategist Steve Bannon was at the height of his influence, while Reince Priebus wielded the chief of staff’s potentially awesome authority with all the gravitas of a substitute teacher.

Then, in the summer of 2017, Priebus was fired and Bannon pushed none-too-gently toward the door. Under Priebus’s replacement, John Kelly, the Trump presidency on some days seemed almost normal. Kelly and his staff put strict controls on the flow of information into the Oval Office while also ending the open-door policy that Priebus had been powerless to curb.

When Kelly left in December 2018, chaos, which had been held in abeyance for at least some of the previous months, returned in full force. One of the unending debates of the Trump presidency is whether Trump intentionally creates this chaos or is somehow helpless against it, against the very disorder he causes daily, if not hourly.

The question of intentionality is impossible for anyone but Trump to answer, and he would surely answer it by claiming that he has had a plan all along. That would be a typically Trumpian boast. That aside, however, it is undeniable that the exhausting storms that mark political life in Washington obscure the ruthlessly effective work happening across the federal government.

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President Donald Trump was defiant and declarative, with all the hammer-on-anvil subtlety that has charted a now-familiar pattern of his presidency: create a crisis, retreat, declare victory, move on.

The president shifted his bulldozer of an administration into reverse, announcing that he would drop his push to seek the citizenship status of all American residents on the census, instead ordering other agencies to share data with the Department of Commerce, which oversees the decennial survey.

The face-saving measure, announced to fanfare in the Rose Garden on Thursday, underscored the president's obsession with projecting a "win" even in the face of defeat. He's demonstrated a reluctance to acknowledge even the minor missteps that have plagued his administration from its start.

After fighting in court and in the press for nearly two years to include the citizenship question, Trump this week insisted it was unnecessary because federal data-sharing would lead to more accurate results.

"We're already finding out who the citizens are and who they're not," Trump said without evidence, barely 12 hours after signing the executive order. "And I think more accurately."