WASHINGTON — The acting director of the Bureau of Prisons was reassigned on Monday, Attorney General William P. Barr announced, the latest fallout over the suicide of the financier Jeffrey Epstein at a chronically understaffed federal jail.

Mr. Barr has said he was “appalled” by Mr. Epstein’s death on Aug. 10 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, where he was being held on federal sex trafficking charges after years of being dogged by accusations of sexually abusing girls.

Mr. Barr announced that the bureau’s acting director, Hugh Hurwitz, was being reassigned to run its re-entry services division and to help carry out President Trump’s prison overhaul agenda. Mr. Barr named Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, who ran the prisons bureau from 1992 to 2003, to replace him.

The suicide of Mr. Epstein, 66, has put pressure on Mr. Barr to explain how such a high-profile defendant was left unsupervised long enough to hang himself. Guards doing morning rounds found Mr. Epstein, prison officials said, and he appeared to have tied a bedsheet to the top of a set of bunk beds, then knelt toward the floor with enough force to break bones in his neck. He had also tried to kill himself in late July, but prison workers had recommended 12 days before his death that he be removed from suicide watch.