Why are so many Vance allies leaving the administration?

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned this week, raising a flurry of questions about whether his departure is part of a larger political reordering that has pushed skeptics of President Donald Trump’s war policies to the margins.

A long-time friend of Vice President JD Vance, Driscoll drew widespread praise for his efforts to modernize the Army. But he has clashed with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, particularly over the latter’s firing of numerous senior military officials, including Army and Air Force generals and the Secretary of the Navy.

Driscoll brought his concerns about these firings directly to Trump last week, who said he was unaware of how many officers had been purged, according to the Atlantic.

Driscoll’s departure is the latest in a string of recent high-profile exits by Vance’s allies and ideological fellow travelers, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Deputy National Security Adviser Andy Baker, White House Director of Legislative Affairs James Braid, and Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Joe Kent.

All of this takes on heightened significance as the second Trump administration reaches its halfway point. In some ways, sources tell RS, it is because Trump is expected to increasingly become a “lame duck” after the midterms that this churn in personnel is taking place. With Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio winding up for a widely anticipated fight to secure the 2028 Republican presidential nomination, we are spotting tantalizing clues about how their battle for influence is playing out, both inside and outside the White House.

For Vance supporters, the rosiest interpretation is that he’s simply setting up an outside shop. Several lower-level Vance allies have left government and moved into positions at the sort of K Street firms that could play a crucial role in fundraising for a future Vance campaign, as Politico reported earlier this year.

Such a network would be particularly valuable for Vance, who only spent two years in the Senate before ascending to the vice presidency. As one source with knowledge of the administration’s internal dynamics said, the “deluge of Vance-aligned departures” could give the vice president’s allies “more freedom to basically do campaign work” if and when he gets his 2028 operation whirring.

For people like Baker and Driscoll, the decision to leave may simply be practical, argued Justin Logan of the Cato Institute. “We tend to underestimate the demands made on these people, especially for those of them who have spouses and kids,” Logan said. In other words, these younger officials may simply want to make some extra money and spend more time with their families before diving into a likely 2028 campaign.

Rubio, meanwhile, is a Beltway creature par excellence, having spent 14 years in the Senate before joining Trump’s team. Given his extensive network of allies in DC, there is little need for Rubio’s aides to leave the administration and start working from the outside.

Another plausible interpretation is that a turf war is underway, and the vice president is losing out. Vance and his allies are broadly associated with foreign-policy restraint and generally skeptical of the wisdom of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. Some sources with knowledge of administration dynamics say sides are forming up, and Rubio’s hawks are ascendant, in many cases getting promoted while Vance’s allies and fellow travelers are leaving altogether.

“I think Andy Baker leaving is a much bigger deal than Driscoll (leaving the Pentagon),” said one source with knowledge of the dynamics inside the government right now. As deputy national security adviser, “Andy’s portfolio was everything,” the source added. “He is a career foreign service officer, deployed overseas, and is aligned with how JD sees the world. His leaving is unfortunately ceding some ground.”

These sources describe a “war” on realists and restrainers that, along with the political intent of supporting a Rubio faction ahead of 2028, aims to impose a pre-Trump neoconservative foreign policy on the Republican party, which means anyone not with the program has to go.

While Gabbard and Kent ultimately resigned, reporting indicates that Gabbard, who made a career out of criticizing the neoconservative war policies of the past, was one of the few top officials to warn Trump against attacking Iran; she was likely squeezed out, according to reports. Kent said he left because there was no room for dissent, and he could not “support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives.” Several of Gabbard’s realist hires were later caught up in a mass “downsizing” by acting DNI Bill Pulte in June.

These shifts have not completely eliminated dissenting opinions inside the administration. Multiple four-star generals warned Hegseth recently that “prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable,” according to the Washington Post. But there is little evidence that these voices are having an impact on Trump’s policy decisions; Hegseth, who is recently reported to harbor presidential ambitions of his own, has consolidated control of military decisions in his office, all but boxing out the uniformed brass over the last year.

Regardless of why the departures are taking place, the upshot is that Rubio and his hawkish friends “have cemented influence and power within the administration,” a source with knowledge of the situation told RS, pointing in particular to Deputy National Security Adviser Mike Needham’s hold over the National Security Council as well as the dominance of Rubio allies in the State Department.

For now, these trends are all playing to Rubio’s advantage. Yet, as one well-connected source pointed out, this could come back to bite him.

Rubio has so far kept his distance from some of Trump’s most controversial policies, including the unpopular Iran war, which Vance and Hegseth have addressed far more publicly. But, now that Vance’s allies are washing out of the administration, it could become increasingly difficult for Rubio to maintain this politically advantageous position.

“The upshot of having more neocons in the room and losing more restraint-minded voices is that this thing doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be getting better,” a source said. “At some point, people are going to start pointing fingers, and someone’s going to have to take ownership.”