President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday, and within hours, reports surfaced that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick could be next. Two White House officials told The Washington Post that Trump has considered replacing both Cabinet members, though no final decisions have been made.
The back-to-back developments mark a second-term shake-up that recalls the personnel churn of Trump's first administration, when FBI Director James Comey, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted just ten days in July 2017, all lost their jobs.
But this time, the reasons are different for each official on the hot seat. Chavez-DeRemer faces a growing list of misconduct allegations. Lutnick has frustrated White House aides with off-message remarks and lingering questions about his ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Both problems carry political risk heading into a midterm season where the administration cannot afford self-inflicted wounds.
Trump confirmed Bondi's departure in a Truth Social post, writing that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche would step in as acting attorney general. Fox News reported that two sources said Trump actually fired Bondi on Wednesday, with the public announcement coming a day later.
The president's language was warm on the surface. He wrote that Bondi "did a tremendous job overseeing a massive crackdown in Crime across our Country" and said she would transition to "a much-needed and important new job in the private sector." But the warmth masked months of building frustration.
As we previously reported, the firing represented a broader effort to reset the Justice Department before the midterms. The Washington Times reported that Trump informed Bondi of her ouster during an Oval Office meeting on Wednesday, before his national remarks on the war in Iran.
Multiple outlets cited Bondi's handling of the Epstein files and her uneven follow-through on politically sensitive prosecutions as the core reasons for her removal. The New York Post reported that Bondi's Epstein-related messaging and delayed disclosures "angered Trump's base and contributed to her loss of support inside the White House." One source put it bluntly to the Post: "When she lost the base, in time, she lost Trump."
The Washington Examiner noted that a major source of tension was the political fallout from the Epstein files controversy, which had led to a scheduled House oversight deposition. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is reportedly a leading contender for the permanent attorney general role.
The Epstein files saga followed Bondi from her first day at the Justice Department to her last, and it now casts a shadow over at least one of the Cabinet members reportedly in jeopardy.
The Daily Mail reported that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a former GOP congresswoman from Oregon, faces accusations she had an affair with her bodyguard, Brian Sloan. The two allegedly traveled together to Las Vegas. Sloan resigned from his position two weeks ago.
The allegations do not stop there. Chavez-DeRemer has been accused of drinking in her office, taking staff to a strip club, and using taxpayer dollars to finance personal trips to her home state of Oregon. She has denied the affair with Sloan and denied all allegations of impropriety. She said she is cooperating with the Inspector General's investigation.
Then there is her husband. Shawn DeRemer was banned from the Labor Department's building after he allegedly touched two staffers inappropriately. The combination of the affair allegations, the misconduct accusations, and the husband's ban from a federal building creates a constellation of problems that no Cabinet secretary can easily survive, regardless of party.
For an administration that promised to clean up Washington, a Labor secretary mired in allegations of personal misconduct and misuse of taxpayer funds is exactly the kind of liability that erodes credibility with the voters who put Trump in office. The pattern of failures that cost Bondi her job offers a template: when controversies pile up faster than results, patience runs out.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick presents a different kind of problem. The 64-year-old former Wall Street executive is not at the center of a personal scandal in the way Chavez-DeRemer is. His trouble is more about message discipline, and a past connection that keeps resurfacing.
White House aides have grown frustrated with Lutnick's communication style and off-the-cuff remarks that at times contradict administration messaging. The most glaring example came in April 2025, when Lutnick said Trump's global tariff policies were "not a negotiation." Hours later, Trump himself said the opposite.
The president told reporters: "The tariffs give us great power to negotiate. They always have." That public contradiction, the Commerce secretary flatly denying a negotiation that the president confirmed the same day, is the kind of unforced error that drives West Wing staff to distraction.
Lutnick also repeatedly suggested that tariffs would bring many jobs back to the United States quickly. That kind of overselling creates expectations the administration may not be able to meet on a timeline voters will accept.
More damaging is the Epstein connection. When the Department of Justice released millions of pages of documents from its investigative files on Epstein in late January, the records revealed that Lutnick continued communication with the disgraced financier well after Epstein's 2008 conviction. Before Congress, Lutnick admitted that he and his family had lunch with Epstein on Epstein's private Caribbean island, a detail that, once public, is impossible to walk back.
The Epstein files have already claimed one Cabinet member. The pressure on Bondi over her handling of those files had been building for months. That the same files now touch Lutnick's personal history makes his position even more precarious.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was also rumored to be on her way out, but a White House official described her as "safe" in her role for the time being. Gabbard continues to brief Trump on intelligence.
The friction with Gabbard appears to be ideological rather than personal. She ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 on a platform of non-interventionism and has a history of criticizing what she calls "regime-change wars." Earlier this week, Trump acknowledged the gap, saying Gabbard is "a little bit different in her thought process than me" on the war in Iran. He has publicly stood by her despite the disagreement.
The reported tensions between Trump and Gabbard over Iran intelligence are real, but for now, the White House appears content to keep her in place while the more urgent personnel questions surrounding Chavez-DeRemer and Lutnick play out.
White House spokesperson David Ingle pushed back on the speculation in a statement to the Daily Mail, calling all three officials "patriots."
"DNI Gabbard, Secretary Lutnick, and Secretary Chavez-DeRemer are tirelessly implementing the President's agenda and achieving tremendous results for the American people. They continue to have the president's full confidence."
That language, "full confidence", is familiar in Washington. It is the standard formulation that precedes either a genuine reprieve or a quiet exit. Both The Washington Post and Politico reported that Trump has not made any final personnel decisions regarding Chavez-DeRemer or Lutnick.
The first major firing of Trump's second term was Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who served for a little over a year. Bondi's removal followed. If Chavez-DeRemer or Lutnick are next, the pace of Cabinet turnover will accelerate in a way that demands the administration move quickly to install replacements who can execute the president's agenda without generating headlines that distract from it.
The open questions are straightforward. Will the Inspector General's investigation into Chavez-DeRemer produce findings that force Trump's hand? Will Lutnick's Epstein ties and messaging problems reach a tipping point? And can the administration afford to fight on multiple confirmation fronts simultaneously while managing a war, a tariff agenda, and a midterm election?
Trump has never been shy about firing people who fail to deliver or who become liabilities. His first term proved that. The question is not whether he is willing to act. It is whether the officials in question can give him a reason not to.
In this White House, "full confidence" buys you time. It does not buy you a guarantee.
