PETER NICHOLAS
JUL 13, 2019
... Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta had gambled that his news conference on Wednesday would appease an audience of one: Trump. But Acosta’s defense of how, as U.S. attorney in Florida, he handled a sex-crimes case against the financier Jeffrey Epstein failed to dampen accusations that he had gone easy on a rich and powerful predator. Amid mounting calls for his resignation, Acosta announced yesterday he would step down. His departure gratifies critics who believed he deserved a comeuppance. Yet political advisers fear the broader tumult inside the administration could also roil Trump’s reelection bid, feeding long-standing criticism that he hasn’t properly vetted his appointees, nor met his promise to recruit the best people. And Acosta’s fall creates a fresh vacancy in an administration that has already seen record-setting turnover.
Relying on a string of officials holding jobs on a temporary basis, Trump is sitting atop a hollowed-out administration that is lacking in the permanent leadership needed to manage escalating foreign and domestic crises, good-government experts told me. Signs suggest the churn isn’t about to stop. Trump has been calling friends and advisers lately about National Security Adviser John Bolton, looking for their impressions of his performance and asking whether he needs to go, according to people who have been briefed on the calls and who, like others I spoke with for this story, requested anonymity to discuss private conversations. Meanwhile, Axios, among other news outlets, reported yesterday that Trump has told confidants he wants to replace Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, with whom the president has had an uneasy relationship.
Acosta was the president’s first and only labor secretary. But should Trump oust Bolton — whose hawkish approach to foreign policy clashes at times with his own reluctance to use military force — he’ll have cycled through four national security advisers in less than three years. Predicting anyone’s future in the Trump White House is chancy, in part because Trump’s public demonstrations of support don’t mean much. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he felt “very badly” for Acosta and that the plea deal he struck with Epstein in 2008 shouldn’t mar his reputation. (Another illuminating example: A year ago, then–Chief of Staff John Kelly walked into a senior-staff meeting and said that Trump had assured him he’d be sticking around through the 2020 election. Five months later, Kelly was gone.) As for Bolton, a person familiar with the matter said his job is secure and that Trump wants him to appear more frequently on television as a surrogate, laying out the administration’s foreign-policy positions ...
At the halfway point in Trump’s term, many federal departments are leaderless or headed by people serving in an acting capacity, which is tantamount to a substitute teacher trying to run a classroom, said Max Stier, the president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group focused on the workings of the federal government. “Leaders matter, and permanent leaders matter a lot,” Stier told me. “This is an unprecedented level of temporary leadership across the entire federal government, but concentrated in places that are acutely worrisome.” He cited key vacancies at the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, “where there are issues at stake right now of high consequence ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/07/acostas-resignation-comes-amid-white-house-vacancies/593851/
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