Assessing President Trump’s second-term staffing record

Personnel are one of the most important tools available to presidents to drive their policy agenda and achieve their priorities. From the highest levels of leadership, including the White House chief of staff and Cabinet secretaries, down to lower-level positions, such as special assistants to the president, agency office directors, and bureau assistant secretaries, presidents have more than 4,000 appointed positions to fill as they enter office. The individuals they choose to fill those positions will head agencies, direct policy implementation, select priorities, make budgetary decisions, and convey the president’s vision.

Getting personnel in place quickly is essential for a president seeking to hit the ground running, and maintaining stability in staffing allows the administration to keep course without constant fluctuations in leadership. On both fronts, President Trump struggled in his first administration, with a slow pace in making nominations, high levels of vacancies, and a frequent churn of staff leaving.

This report examines Trump’s approach to personnel in the first year of his second administration, assessing what lessons the president learned from his first administration and what themes remain the same. The report focuses on two types of presidential appointments: the most senior staff members in the Executive Office of the President (“EOP”) and Senate-confirmed political appointees who serve at the highest levels across the federal government. Presidents have the greatest control over the placement and removal of officials in these positions, as compared to the federal career workforce that has greater restrictions on hiring and firing processes.

From our analysis, we have identified three key lessons that Trump and his inner circle have learned from the first administration. First, the president learned the value of transition planning. We find that the increased emphasis on transition planning prior to the 2024 election paved the way for the president to fill multiple staff positions across the executive branch. Early and careful planning represented a stark contrast to President Trump’s first term. Second, Trump’s team placed a premium on loyalty above all else in evaluating staff for his second administration. The intense emphasis on loyalty likely fueled increased staff stability, as demonstrated by a lower turnover rate among senior staff members. Finally, President Trump has aggressively exercised and tested the bounds of his removal power to attempt to create an executive branch that is less independent and more accountable to him. Taken together, Trump has made gains in more quickly staffing the EOP and executive agencies with officials more stringently loyal to him, while removing officials who may have exercised their independence contrary to the president’s wishes. This approach has assisted the president’s pursuit of his agenda while removing key guardrails in place to prevent overreach and calamity.

The most influential, unelected staff members in the U.S. government serve in the Executive Office of the President. Their proximity to the president affords them influence on myriad decisions. Understanding their roles, responsibilities, and how long they stay in their positions informs our understanding of how the modern presidency operates.

Identifying the subset of influential staff members surrounding the president—colloquially known as the “A-Team”—is difficult. For starters, there is little transparency about who occupies these senior positions, and government sources are often dated or inaccurate for other reasons.¹ Identifying the A-Team draws heavily from the work of the National Journal, which published “Decisionmakers,” a magazine-sized special edition that identified key staff members at the start of administrations beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1981 and ending with Barack Obama in 2009.² From there, we consult numerous online sources to supplement and update the A-Team for subsequent administrations: Trump (2017 and 2025) and Biden (2021). Often, reporters will write articles on new White House positions, presidential priorities, or whose office is closest to the “Oval,” and each of these pieces of information helps determine the set of staff members serving on the A-Team. For the purposes of this study, A-Team turnover refers to a personnel action that creates a vacancy through voluntary resignation, firing, or promotion.

Staff turnover in 2025

Record-setting staff turnover and borderline chaos characterized Trump’s first term. That experience might have helped to produce a seemingly more stable staff organization in the second term. As shown in Figure 1, a little over one-third of Trump’s A-Team departed during his first year in office, compared to just under 30% in the first year of his second term in office. Still, Figure 1 shows that turnover during both 2017 and 2025 far exceeded turnover in each president’s A-Team all the way back to Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Why the 2025 decline in turnover?

First, Trump empowered three external groups to play key planning roles: America First Policy Institute, the Center for Renewing America, and the Heritage Foundation (through “Project 2025”).³ Each of these organizations devoted ample resources to preparing for a possible second Trump administration between 2021 and 2024. Their combined efforts laid the groundwork for the current staff structure and composition.

These groups focused on hiring loyalists and included the return of several first-term Trump confidants: Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, Kevin Hassett, Ross Worthington, Karoline Leavitt, Michael Kratsios, Peter Navarro, and others. The combination of prioritizing loyalty along with rehiring former Trump White House veterans may have contributed to assembling a staff less inclined toward infighting and more responsive to the president.

The emphasis on loyalty may also have created a staff less likely to have ideological disagreements. This homogeneity among senior staff members might have contributed to the decline in A-Team turnover.

In addition, President Trump stopped the practice of publicly firing senior staff members—something that was commonplace in 2017. In fact, in one case, National Security Adviser Waltz committed a major error by including a member of the press in a Signal group chat, but President Trump was reluctant to fire him. Instead, he moved Waltz to a Senate-confirmed position as U.S. Representative to the United Nations. In 2017, senior staff members like Chief of Staff Reince Priebus were fired publicly for less overt errors of judgment.

Second, staff members who departed during 2025 were much less publicly visible, and their departure was marked by less animus than some departures during Trump’s first term. Apart from National Security Adviser Waltz moving to the United Nations, the two most significant staff departures in the first year were relatively unknown in the public sphere: Sergio Gor, director of the Office of Presidential Personnel (a critical role throughout an administration, but particularly in the early days) and Taylor Budowich, a deputy chief of staff who wore several hats, overseeing communications, public liaison, and the Cabinet. The lower public profile of these two, coupled with the quiet nature of their departures, was noticeably different from the sturm und drang in Trump’s first term. (Gor was promoted to ambassador to India, and Budowich left for the private sector.)

Departures in 2025 also differed strikingly from those in 2017. Staff members can leave by resigning, being promoted, or resigning under pressure. The frequency of forced resignations dropped significantly in 2025. In 2017, over half of the first-term departures were forced resignations. In 2025, 40% of the departures were forced resignations. Interestingly, in 2025, forced resignations were limited to staffers serving on the National Security Council (NSC). News reports at the time suggested that Laura Loomer, a Trump supporter and activist, influenced the decision to fire multiple staff members from the NSC.

New and recurring patterns in Trump staffing

While staffing in the second Trump term has been more stable than the first, the turnover rate is still high compared to previous presidents. And although there was less drama related to staff departures in 2025, unusual patterns of staff assignments that emerged in the first term remain.

One unique feature of the second term has been Trump’s altering of the role of NSC through a spring purge of officials and by appointing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to serve simultaneously as the national security adviser. While the NSC also underwent a great deal of staff turnover early on in the first Trump administration (with the mid-February departure of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland’s departure in May 2017, among others), assigning the secretary of state to serve simultaneously as the NSC adviser undermined the primary role of that office—to coordinate among the various foreign policy stakeholders so that the president has a complete picture of the various perspectives. Presumably, when the secretary of state is also serving as the national security adviser, the interests of the State Department will be overrepresented. Regardless, it is a bold departure from tradition.

The last president to try this dual-hatted approach was President Nixon in 1973, when he appointed then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to also serve as secretary of state. Kissinger filled those two roles for just over two years. President Nixon wanted to consolidate foreign policymaking in a trusted individual, which enabled him to circumvent the traditional bureaucracy. In a similar vein, President Trump may have wanted to consolidate foreign policymaking in a single individual, Marco Rubio, for ease of management. Though once political rivals, Secretary of State Rubio had clearly demonstrated his loyalty and managed to exercise tremendous influence within the Trump administration during 2025.

While the overall tenor within the White House has changed since 2017, some of Trump’s first-term staffing practices remain. For example, when the president finds a trustworthy staff member, that individual often gets assigned multiple jobs, creating an expansive and possibly unmanageable portfolio. In the first term, it was John DeStefano who was overseeing four offices—an unprecedented portfolio: personnel, public liaison, intergovernmental affairs, and political affairs. Then, Office and Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney also served as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This time around, he has built upon this practice by also asking Cabinet secretaries to hold more than one position. For example, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent serves as acting commissioner of the IRS; Secretary of State Marco Rubio is also national security adviser (as noted above), acting archivist of the United States, and former acting administrator of USAID; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy served as NASA administrator for the latter part of 2025. This dual- and triple-hatting approach to staffing is unique to President Trump, and while there have not been public missteps related to fulfilling these vast responsibilities, it seems unlikely that a single individual can fulfill all the tasks related to the various assignments.⁴ There is likely a reason that other presidents do not assign senior staff members to more than a single job.

Another recurring staffing pattern is that when vacancies occur, President Trump tends to fill them with existing EOP staff members, creating more staff instability. For example, when the Deputy National Security Adviser Alex Wong resigned under pressure, President Trump assigned two staff members to fill the position (Robert Gabriel, assistant to the president for policy, and Andy Baker, Vice President Vance’s national security adviser). It is unclear whether these individuals still maintain the responsibilities of their initial assignments and have added this new role to their portfolio. Another example was when the Director of Presidential Personnel (PPO), Sergio Gor, departed, and President Trump appointed Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino to succeed Mr. Gor. Again, it is not clear whether Dan Scavino is fulfilling both sets of job responsibilities or is solely focused on presidential personnel.

Presidents are responsible for filling more than 1,300 Senate-confirmed positions across the federal government. These positions range from the most senior, such as Cabinet secretaries and agency heads, to lower-level office or bureau leaders such as assistant secretaries and directors, alongside commissioners, inspectors general, and ambassadors.

Each new administration has the considerable task of recruiting, vetting, nominating, and shepherding individuals through the Senate confirmation process for the myriad positions they can fill. Getting Senate-confirmed officials in their positions as quickly as possible is essential for incoming presidents seeking to drive agency policymaking and program administration in accordance with the president’s priorities and agenda. In 2025, while President Trump moved swiftly to send high-level nominations to the Senate at the very beginning of his term, his pace slackened over the course of 2025. In addition, the White House also withdrew an unprecedented number of nominees.

Hit the ground running with a stumble along the way

Similar to staffing the Executive Office of the President, the second Trump administration operated differently when it came to nominations to senior executive branch positions. In some ways, this is a more complex task than staffing the White House due to the need to secure the support of a Senate majority.

President Trump and his team drew upon the months-long work of external organizations to recruit, vet, and train potential appointees. This preparation paved the way for a quicker pace of nominations compared to his record in 2017. Over the course of the transition period before Trump’s 2025 inauguration (approximately 76 days), President Trump made 163 personnel announcements. This was 33 more than President Obama and more than twice the number Trump made during his first transition (72).

Once in office, President Trump continued the fast pace, making record numbers of nominations in the early period of his first year. On Inauguration Day alone in January 2025, the White House submitted 66 nominations, 30 more than his closest contemporary since 1981, President Biden (36). Through the first quarter of 2025, Trump made an unprecedented 289 nominations. This was more than four times as many nominations as the average between Reagan and Biden and more than six times the number Trump made in his first term.

While Trump had significant momentum in the early months of his administration, his activity on the personnel front quickly dissipated through the rest of his first year back in office. In each subsequent quarter since the first, Trump made fewer nominations than in the previous one and set historic lows compared to his predecessors (going back to Reagan). Trump’s 165 nominations in quarters two through four are more than 60% less than the historical average between Reagan and Biden (424). Despite his initial success, Trump ended the first year making fewer nominations (454) than most of his recent contemporaries. However, Trump did improve on his first term efforts, making over 50 more nominations than he did in his first term (397).

In addition to a declining pace of nominations, Trump set record highs in the number of nominations he withdrew from Senate consideration. Trump has withdrawn nearly four times as many nominees in the first year (54) as his nearest contemporary, Biden (14), and only one fewer than presidents Clinton through Biden combined. Approximately 12% of Trump’s nominations have been withdrawn.

This level of withdrawals represents a serious loss of time and resources for nominees, the White House Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), the Senate committees conducting vetting, and senators themselves, as well as a loss of momentum for the administration. Further, it exposed a PPO that was prone to errors and had not conducted thorough vetting prior to submitting a nomination to the Senate.

New Senate rules allow for a boost in confirmations

Despite these setbacks, one of the most notable events in President Trump’s first year back in office was a Senate rule change in September 2025 that allowed the majority to bundle up for consideration an unlimited number of executive nominees with a single simple majority vote. President Trump and Senate Republicans had become increasingly frustrated that almost every one of Trump’s nominees faced procedural barriers when Democrats insisted on recorded votes both to cut off debate and to confirm nominees. Senate Republicans complained that these floor votes required the Senate majority to spend hours of precious floor time on each nominee. In the period before the rule change, Trump saw roughly the same number of nominees confirmed as in his first term, despite submitting far more nominations.

Trump’s repeated pleas, along with Senate Republican frustrations with procedural barriers, resulted in the majority invoking what is known as the nuclear option to change the way the Senate handles executive branch nominations, excluding Cabinet-level positions. In the period between the rule change and the end of the year, more of President Trump’s nominees were confirmed than any president since Reagan. The 224 confirmations in this period were nearly 50 more than his next nearest contemporary, President George H.W. Bush, and over 70% more confirmations than he made in the first year of his first administration.

With the rule change, the Senate was able to move three large bundles of nominations that account for over 60% of all confirmations in Trump’s first year. Prior to the rule change, the highest number of confirmations in one day was eight. Since the rule change, the Senate has confirmed 80 or more nominees twice in one day.

The Senate rule change and resulting large bundles of simultaneous confirmations enabled many more nominees to be confirmed in the first year than would have been possible under procedures required prior to the change. By the end of his first year, 352 of Trump’s nominees had been confirmed, over 100 more than in his first administration (248).

The rule change allowed President Trump to secure confirmation of the highest percentage of nominees in the first year (77.5%), going back to 2001 with President George W. Bush (80.9%). This is significant because it reverses a trend spanning back to the Obama administration in which each subsequent administration saw a smaller percentage of their first-year nominees confirmed by the end of the year. In his second administration, 15% more of President Trump’s nominees were confirmed compared to the first term, despite the record-setting rate of nomination withdrawals.

Year of unprecedented firings

President Trump also removed scores of executive (and some legislative) branch Senate-confirmed appointees, particularly those whom Congress, in designing their agencies, intended to exercise independent authority or provide politically neutral expertise. In the early days of the administration, President Trump’s director of PPO, Segio Gor, affirmed this approach, saying, “…we’re also cleaning house. And so, we started the process of terminating a lot of positions. It’s time for a fresh start.”

One of President Trump’s initial targets for firing was inspectors general—nonpartisan, independent officials intended to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending and operations. On Jan. 24, 2025, less than a week into his second administration, President Trump fired 16 presidentially appointed inspectors general, as well as additional acting inspectors general. In October, he fired another inspector general, Parisa Salehi, the inspector general of the Export-Import Bank. Presidents historically have respected the independence of inspectors general and have allowed them to serve across administrations.

Equally consequential has been Trump’s firings of officials with “for-cause” protections. Congress has historically provided statutory protection to certain officials, typically members of independent agencies, boards, and commissions, to be protected from removal except in cases of “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” These protections are intended to insulate policymakers in independent agencies, prohibiting new presidents from remaking the membership and policy orientation of ostensibly independent bodies. With the possible exception of Federal Reserve governors, the Supreme Court so far has greenlighted these removals while lawsuits over firings play out in the lower courts.

In his first year in office, Trump fired or attempted to fire 18 board and commission members with for-cause protections, as well as two executive agency officials with the same statutory protections.⁵ These firings have had a substantial impact on the operation, composition, and independence of the affected organizations. The Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board were left without a quorum for several months, leaving them unable to decide cases affecting the government or private sector.

President Trump has also pursued firings that, while legally allowable, are in contrast with the longstanding norms and practices of presidents of both parties. He has fired 14 additional Senate-confirmed board and commission members who serve for fixed terms but do not have for-cause protections, along with two board and commission general counsels. Additionally, President Trump has recently recalled nearly 30 career foreign service officers from their postings around the world. Finally, Trump has fired or tried to fire an additional six executive agency officials and two congressional agency officials. Among those fired were two officials Trump nominated and confirmed in 2025; former IRS Commissioner Billy Long and former CDC Director Susan Monarez were fired because they failed to toe the line for the administration.

The actions of Trump and his administration in their first year back in office suggest that Trump—or at least his closest advisers—learned three key lessons from his first term. First and foremost, Trump learned the value of extensive transition planning. He drew on the planning and organizing capabilities of external organizations. This newfound willingness to prepare for governing allowed President Trump to hit the ground running on Jan. 20, 2025. This stands in stark contrast to his first term that was hampered by a change in the leadership of the transition operation, disdain for the process, and less support from external organizations.

Second, Trump prioritized vetting potential staff members to maximize loyalty. It may have been this approach that resulted in less “A-Team” turnover, but it was critical for a president and administration that have railed against the “deep state.” While other presidents weighed experience, expertise, and competence along with loyalty to the chief executive, President Trump focused primarily on job candidates who were loyal to him. By all accounts, the president achieved what he set out to do. At the end of his first year, the A-Team appeared more stable, and there were approximately 100 more Senate-confirmed appointees in place than in 2017.

Finally, the president has pushed aside laws, precedents, and norms to prevent his policy agenda from being impeded. Rather than being constrained by these guardrails, the president sought to test their limits. Those affected await the courts’ rulings, which tend to occur months after his actions. Trump’s aggressive exercise of executive power has allowed him to assert greater control over executive branch operations. He has minimized oversight and the capacity of independent authorities to act against his wishes: removing inspectors general that conduct nonpartisan, independent oversight to investigate waste, fraud, and abuse; firing independent board and commission members to change the partisan composition of the board or to make the entity inoperable; and recalling career ambassadors that exercise independent expertise and judgment. Each serves the same purpose—to centralize political power in the White House and the president’s hands.

The White House’s focus will soon shift from programmatic and legislative achievements to minimizing losses in the 2026 midterm elections. In the case of the A-Team, all presidents going back to Reagan (except for President Trump’s first term) experienced an uptick in senior-level staff turnover during year two. In addition, while President Trump’s Cabinet was remarkably stable in the first year of his second term, rumors of an impending shake-up abound. Whether because of burnout, higher pay in the private sector, or waning interest as a president’s focus shifts to campaigning, enthusiasm typically declines in the second year of an administration. Poll numbers sink, and second-term presidents begin to take on the trappings of lame ducks. That shift is likely to affect the Senate confirmation process, as the tepid pace of nominations late in 2025 does not bode well for staffing the executive branch.