President Trump is burning through staff at a rate much higher than his five predecessors, setting a record of losing 34 per cent of his key White House aides in his first year.
Brookings Institution senior fellow Kathryn Dunn Tenpas crunched the numbers and figured out that Trump's turnover is more than triple what Democratic President Obama saw in his first year and double that of Republican President Ronald Reagan.
When looking at the most visible positions – jobs like press secretary and White House chief of staff, which Tenpas dubs as 'Tier One' posts – half of those individuals left Trump's staff before January 19 of this year.
Overall, Tenpas looked at 64 prominent jobs in the Trump administration, consisting of 19 positions unique to Trump, along with 45 prominent job titles that were also used in previous administrations.
The researcher benefited from the fact that the National Journal previously compiled lists of 'Decision Makers' within an administration's first year, a study that started in 1981 with Reagan and concluded in 2009, with Obama's staff.
Piggybacking on National Journal's research, Tenpas tried to do the same thing with Trump and then see how many individuals still held down those jobs a year after the Republican president's swearing-in ceremony.
What she found was that six of the 12 people in 'Tier One' positions were already gone.
First to go was National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who resigned on February 10, 2017. He was soon followed by Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh on March 30.
Then there were the double departures of Republican National Committee alumni Sean Spicer, the president's first press secretary, and Reince Priebus, the president's first chief of staff in July.
The departures of George Sifakis, assistant to the president, and KT McFarland, deputy national security adviser, also counted toward the six of 12 'Tier One' job losses.
And by comparison, Obama only lost one top-tier adviser in the same amount of time, while President George W. Bush lost zero high-level staffers.
