After Bondi's ouster, Chavez-DeRemer and Lutnick reportedly next on Trump's chopping block

Two more Cabinet members are sitting on thin ice. According to two White House officials who spoke to The Washington Post, President Donald Trump has considered replacing both Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in the wake of Attorney General Pam Bondi's firing on Thursday.

White House spokesperson David Ingle pushed back on the speculation:

"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."

Ingle described all three as "patriots." But confidence and job security have never been synonymous in this White House, and the fact that a formal statement was necessary tells its own story.

The Chavez-DeRemer problem

The Labor Secretary, a former GOP congresswoman from Oregon, is drowning in allegations that have nothing to do with labor policy. She faces accusations of an affair with her bodyguard, Brian Sloan, who resigned from his position two weeks ago. She has also 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. She and Sloan allegedly traveled together to Las Vegas, as Daily Mail reports.

Chavez-DeRemer has denied the affair. She has denied all allegations of impropriety. She says she is cooperating with the Inspector General's investigation.

Then there's her husband. Shawn DeRemer was banned from the Labor Department's building after he allegedly touched two staffers inappropriately.

Whether or not every accusation holds up, the sheer volume of them creates a gravitational drag that no Cabinet secretary can afford. The Inspector General investigation alone guarantees weeks of headlines. Every day spent explaining personal conduct is a day not spent executing the President's agenda on workforce policy, deregulation, or reining in a federal bureaucracy that desperately needs it.

Personnel is policy. When the person becomes the story, the policy stops moving.

Lutnick's messaging misfires

Howard Lutnick's problems are different in kind but no less serious. The 64-year-old former Wall Street executive has reportedly frustrated numerous White House aides with his communication style, particularly his tendency to get out ahead of the President's own messaging on trade.

The most glaring example came in April 2025, when Lutnick declared that Trump's global tariff policies were "not a negotiation." Hours later, Trump himself said the quiet part out loud:

"The tariffs give us great power to negotiate. They always have."

That is not a subtle contradiction. When your Commerce Secretary tells the world there's no deal to be made, and the President follows up by saying the entire point is leverage, you have a messaging problem that undermines the strategy itself. Lutnick has also repeatedly suggested tariffs will "bring many jobs" back quickly, a claim that requires careful framing when the timeline is longer and more complex than a soundbite allows.

The Epstein shadow

Compounding Lutnick's difficulties is a problem no amount of good trade numbers can fix. When the Department of Justice released millions of pages of documents from its investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein in late January, it was revealed that Lutnick continued communication with the disgraced financier well after Epstein's 2008 conviction.

Lutnick was forced to admit in front of Congress that he and his family had lunch with Epstein on his private Caribbean island, one of the main locations where Epstein sex trafficked underage girls.

There is no spinning that. There is no communications strategy clever enough to make "lunch on Epstein's island" disappear from a congressional testimony transcript. It sits there, waiting for every political opponent, every hostile journalist, every Democratic campaign ad to pick it up and use it.

Gabbard stays, for now

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was also rumored to be on her way out, but a White House official described her as "safe." Trump publicly stood by her, though he acknowledged earlier this week that she is "a little bit different in her thought process than me" on the subject of the war in Iran.

Gabbard, who ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 largely on opposition to what she called "regime-change wars," continues to brief Trump on intelligence. The President's willingness to keep someone whose instincts diverge from his own on a major foreign policy question suggests he values the intelligence product she delivers, even when their frameworks differ.

The pattern

None of this is new territory for a Trump administration. The first term produced a roster of high-profile departures that reads like a political thriller's cast page:

• FBI Director James Comey
• Secretary of State Rex Tillerson
• Attorney General Jeff Sessions
• National Security Advisor John Bolton
• White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted just 10 days in July 2017 before getting axed and has since become a harsh Trump critic

The second term has already claimed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who served a little over a year before becoming the first major firing of this administration, and now Bondi.

Trump has historically been reluctant to pull the trigger on major firings, but when the moment comes, it comes fast. The pattern is not impulsiveness. It is patience followed by decisiveness. He gives people room to perform, and when they don't, or when the baggage becomes heavier than the contribution, the calculation changes.

What comes next

The real question isn't whether Chavez-DeRemer or Lutnick will be fired. It's whether either can deliver enough results to outweigh the distractions they carry. A Labor Secretary under Inspector General investigation and a Commerce Secretary whose Epstein connections resurface every news cycle both face the same fundamental math: the cost of keeping them has to stay below the cost of replacing them.

Cabinet turnover always carries a price. Confirmation fights burn political capital. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. Opponents get another news cycle to frame chaos narratives. But the price of keeping someone who can't execute, or whose personal baggage consumes the oxygen needed for policy wins, is higher.

The President built his brand on a very specific phrase. Whether Chavez-DeRemer and Lutnick hear it next depends entirely on whether they can make the story about the work again, and not about themselves.