Now that Alberto Gonzalez is, in the words of an anonymous Republican advisor quoted on the radio yesterday, “finished,” I’ve been wondering: Has the Bush administration seen an unusual number of high-level resignations, compared to past administrations? To be fair, this administration should be compared only to other two-term administrations, even if a comparison were on a per-year basis, since there is typically a lot of voluntary turnover for personal reasons between a first and second term.
Among others, the following individuals have resigned from high-level posts:
Colin Powell
Donald Rumsfeld
John Ashcroft
George Tenet
Porter Goss
Richard Clarke
Paul O’Neill
Christine Todd Whitman
Most recently, several officials in the wake of the Walter Reed scandal
A longer and broader list, albeit two years old, is collected here.
My impression is that there have been an anomalous number of resignations, but I can’t find any comparison to other presidencies.
To compare to Clinton, up to a similar point in his presidency he had: two secretaries of state; two treasury secretaries; three secretaries of defense; one attorney general; and three secretaries of energy, three CIA directors, two national security advisors, and three White House chiefs of staff.
And Reagan had two secretaries of state, two treasury secretaries; two attorney generals; three secretaries of transportation; three secretaries of energy; two CIA directors, six national security advisors, and three chiefs of staff in roughly the same time.
(Collected from various sources)
Personally, I don’t see anything too out of the ordinary in comparing Bush, Clinton, and Reagan. I wasn’t inclined to go back further in history because I was comparing several sources.
Limiting the list to Cabinet Secretaries, the following resigned during the course of the Clinton Administration:
Secretary of State: Warren Christopher
Secretary of the Treasury: Lloyd Bentsen, Robert Rubin
Secretary of Defense: Les Aspin, William Perry
Secretary of Agriculture: Mike Espy
Secretary of Commerce: Ronald H. Brown, Mickey Kantor, William M. Daley
Secretary of Labor: Robert Reich
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: Henry G. Cisneros
Secretary of Transportation: Federico F. Pena
Secretary of Energy: Hazel R. O’Leary, Frederico F. Pena
Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs: Jesse Brown
Don’t know if it is fair to count Pena’s Transportation gig, as he basically transferred into the Energy slot. Definitely fair to count the Energy dept. though. O’Leary screwed the pooch so badly that Pena was not up to the task of coming close to fixing things.
There’s a quantitative analysis here (Reagan had SIX national security advisors!) and a qualitative analysis (there are reasons why he went through so many advisors). So there can be debate on the qualitative analysis – as in, Clinton went through many Energy Secretaries because things were so screwed up – but the numbers of high-level resignations are not really a story in and of themselves.
I’ve looked up the numbers on Nixon: at a similar point in his presidency, he had two secretaries of state, four secretaries of treasury, three secretaries of defense, four attorneys general, three secretaries of commerce, three secretaries of health, education and welfare, one national security advisor, two chiefs of staff, and three CIA directors.
Some time ago, I posted a related question to which I got zero responses. I’m going to try again here - Does this administration have an unusually number of corruption-related indictments and/or convictions, compared to the same stage in, say, the last five administrations?