When national security deputy Dina Powell effortlessly parted ways with the White House, many predicted that her departure would set off an inevitable chain reaction. “There will be an exodus from this administration in January,” one D.C. veteran predicted back in September. “Everyone says, ‘I just need to stay for one year.’ If you leave before a year, it looks like you are acknowledging that you made a mistake.” Now, with less than a month to go before the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the tidal wave is taking shape, leaving a relatively bare-bones administration searching increasingly further afield for replacements.

Thursday alone saw the departure of Rick Dearborn,, a campaign holdover and the president’s current deputy chief of staff, and Jeremy Katz, deputy director of the National Economic Council. And Politico reports that with even more staffers expected to give their two weeks’ notice, either under their own steam or via an Omarosa Manigault-esque purgation, Trump is mulling reaching out to other outside advisers to fill his depleted ranks.

Those at the top of Trump’s list reportedly include Larry Kudlow, a former Ronald Reagan adviser, who may replace Gary Cohn as National Economic Council director. (Cohn has not announced plans to leave but told friends he’d be “weighing his options over the holidays.”) Trump is also considering a handful of controversial loyalists who couldn’t make it to the White House the first time around: Jason Miller, his initial choice for communications director, who left the transition team over an affair with a co-worker; and Corey Lewandowski, his former campaign director, whose attempts to win the president back have included writing a book about Trump’s glowing leadership capabilities, and arguing that Trump is “[not] being served well” by his current political outreach team. (Politico added that there is a “big push” to get Lewandowski and former deputy campaign manager David Bossie back into the White House, ostensibly to address the electoral failures of the first year’s political operation.)

The myriad exits threaten to erode the administration’s vacancy problem: as of November 22, there were still more than 250 open positions in the White House, which seemingly has no plans to fill them immediately. But the bigger concern, as one former administration official told Politico, is that the exodus could lead to a “brain drain from the policy staff, and an effort to turn the White House into more of a political or messaging operation.” Add to that the potential for an electoral slaughter in 2018, the relentless pressure of the Russia probe, and the volatile nature of Trump himself, and it’s no wonder only the most inexplicably loyal foot soldiers would aspire to work in the White House.