🔮 Who's Out First?
Will heads roll after the tariff rollout?
Yesterday’s announcement of big tariffs on America’s trade partners sent odds for a recession in 2025 soaring and touched off speculation that architects of the policy could be headed for the exit soon.
Polymarket now has several active markets on which of Trump’s cabinet members will exit the administration.
Baseline
One of the key ideas in forecasting is choosing a good baseline for comparison.
Should we look at the tenure of officials in all past administrations? The last few years? Or, given our president’s unique HR style, is it better to compare against his first term? Let’s keep it simple and look at Trump 45 as a baseline:
Outliers?
In his first term, two Trump officials failed to make it 100 days:
Michael Flynn resigned as National Security Advisor after just 24 days. At the time, the reported reason for his resignation was that Flynn misled Mike Pence about contacts he had with the Russian ambassador.
Anthony Scaramucci’s 10-day tenure as Communications Director ended after a New Yorker article came out with quotes of him shit-talking multiple members of the administration. Ironically, Scaramucci had been brought in to run an anti-leaking operation.
You could make a reasonable case for throwing these two out of the sample as outliers; it’s difficult to imagine the Trump of today caring about the Flynn revelations. But for simplicity, let’s keep both in. This gives us an average expected cabinet tenure of ~450 days.
Now that we have the average length, we can calculate that a member of the Trump first term had a:
6.5% chance of getting fired in any month
55.5% chance of getting fired in any year
How do the top contenders stack up against this baseline?
Elon Musk: 🔮43% Chance Out by July
Why He Could Be Out Soon:
DOGE Unpopularity: A recent poll showed 60% disapproval for DOGE among all voters, but with a huge partisan split. This is higher disapproval than the administration overall, but opinion is split as to whether DOGE and Musk are acting as a lightning rod to protect Trump from the fallout, or are dragging down Trump’s numbers.
Wisconsin: The Democratic win in the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, where Elon went “all-in” campaigning for the Republican, corresponds with a large bump in his exit odds.
Politico Article: Musk’s exit odds spiked to over 80% on an April 2 Politico article (denounced by the administration as “garbage”) that said he would depart around May or early June, which ends the 130-day period that he can legally serve as a “special government employee”
Above Baseline. According to the baseline, we would expect an average first Trump termer to have a ~18% chance of exiting the administration before July. The current market rate of 43% is more than double this.
Mike Waltz: 🔮 38% Chance Out in 2025
Why He Could Be Out Soon
Signalgate. The Signal chat scandal, where Waltz included an Atlantic reporter in a Signal group chat discussion of sensitive war plans, does not seem to be fading. New reporting suggests that Waltz may have had 20 Signal groups for different military ops, and used a personal Gmail account to share defense info.
Below Baseline. But despite the worsening revelations about Waltz’ security hygiene, the market sees him as more safe than an average first term cabinet member (45.4% baseline firing odds by Dec. 31 vs current market odds of 38%).
Runners Up
Once you get past Elon and Waltz, a few others stand out:
Howard Lutnick (🔮 34% out in 2025): Lutnick’s exit odds more than doubled on reporting that he may be the “fall guy” for Trump’s tariff policy if it backfires. As of this writing, recession odds have spiked, along with odds for the NYSE circuit breaker to be triggered this year (🔮24%), an indicator of financial market panic.
RFK Jr. (🔮 28% out in 2025): Recent reports have emerged that RFK Jr. is butting heads with others in the administration, as well as some (unconfirmed, alleged) social media drama suggesting that the Olivia Nuzzi sexting scandal could have more shoes to drop.
Beyond this top tier, others are looking even safer:
Bottom Line
Even with the tariff market nuke and Signal scandal, traders are forecasting much better job security for Trump’s cabinet compared to the first term.
The only exception to this is Musk, who is the only Trump official predicted to exit sooner than the average first termer.
Looking back at the history, we see how more turnover starts to hit around the one-year mark. But there could be some surprises still: there’s a 🔮85% chance at least one member exits before 2025 is out.
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By law, Musk must leave before 130 days. Why is he even included here?