President Donald Trump has lost more of his Cabinet secretaries to corruption and other ethics concerns in his first term than any other president in U.S. history. The departure of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta over the past sweetheart deal he gave pedophile hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein is just the latest incident. With Acosta’s announced exit, the total number of ethics-related Cabinet-level departures in the Trump administration has reached five. This is an ignominious record for a president who claimed he would “drain the swamp” in Washington and eliminate corruption. The president has instead run one of the most corrupt administrations in American history with lax oversight, nepotism, self-dealing and the appointment of dozens of lobbyists to oversee the industries they previously worked for. Other presidents have seen high profile departures from their Cabinets related to ethics concerns. Notably, President Ronald Reagan’s first director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Anne Gorsuch (mother to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch), left her position after being found in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over records about the misuse of Superfund money. James Watt, Reagan’s interior secretary, was pushed out after mocking diversity in a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (He was later found guilty of lying in an investigation into his influence-peddling as a lobbyist.) The five Cabinet secretaries who have left or are leaving the Trump administration under clouds of alleged corruption are former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, former Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin, former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Acosta.

ASSOCIATED PRESS President Donald Trump appeared on July 12 with Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to announce the latter's resignation.

Price was the first to go after Politico reported that he was using government funds to pay for private charter jets and misusing military planes for personal travel. He lasted only 231 days in office before Trump demanded his resignation in September 2017. An inspector general report found that Price had wasted $341,000 on private and military jets in contravention of government travel rules. The next ethically challenged Cabinet official to depart was Shulkin, the Veterans Affairs secretary. Like Price, Shulkin violated government travel rules by lying about a European work trip that was actually a shopping and sightseeing adventure for him and his wife. An inspector general report found that Shulkin’s chief of staff falsified the purpose of the trip and that the agency improperly paid for the secretary’s wife to travel. It also revealed Shulkin to have improperly accepted tickets to Wimbledon and directed a staffer to essentially act as his concierge for the personal trip. Shulkin was dismissed by Trump in March 2018. Pruitt was pushed out of the administration in July 2018 after 18 separate investigations were opened into his corruption and waste of government resources. There was the reduced priced townhouse room rental he received from a lobbyist connected to the oil and gas industry. He also spent excessively on first-class air travel, wasted money on luxury hotels and fancy restaurants, sought his own private jet and pressured aides to find his wife a lucrative job, among many other things.

ASSOCIATED PRESS Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke resigned amid 20 investigations into alleged misconduct.