Who Leaves The Trump Administration Next? Odds Say 7 More

Kalshi's board of Trump administration departure odds has already settled twice this year on the question of who leaves, and it is a few weeks from a third settlement. Karoline Leavitt's contract trades at 99.5 cents bid, 99.6 asked, after President Trump announced in an August 12 Truth Social post that she will step down as White House press secretary at the end of the month and shift to an outside advisory role (per NBC News and CNN). Behind her, the name the money argues about hardest is FBI Director Kash Patel: his market has traded about 1.21 million contracts, more than any other single market on the event, yet it prices him at just 32 to 33 cents, roughly a one-in-three chance of leaving before 2027. Every price on this board is a probability, and the most useful number here is not any single name. It is what you get when you add all 31 of them up, and that math is below.

The Quick Answer

Kalshi's "who will leave their role in the Trump administration in 2026" market prices Karoline Leavitt at about 99.5% after her August 12 resignation announcement. Behind her sit the DOGE Service's Amy Gleason (42%), chief of staff Susie Wiles (34.5%), Kash Patel (32.5%), and Pete Hegseth (31.5%) as the likeliest still-undecided departures; Tulsi Gabbard's and Todd Blanche's contracts already settled yes. The full 31-name board, the year of turnover the board only partly captures, and the summed-board math that implies about seven more settlements are all below.

The Market At A Glance

The clause worth reading twice is the promotion rule, because it already paid. Todd Blanche had been running the Justice Department as acting attorney general since early April, but his contract settled yes only on August 10, after the Senate confirmed him as attorney general and he formally vacated the deputy attorney general role the contract was written on. Handicapping this board means pricing every door out of a job, including the one that leads up.

The Live Departure Board

Every market shown as active on the August 12 pull is listed; volume is in contracts. Implied % is the bid-ask midpoint, so treat it as an estimate on the thinner names, where a 2-cent spread is real uncertainty about where the market stands. Kalshi's tick size drops below one cent under 10¢ and above 90¢, which is why the Leavitt and Turner rows quote tenths.

Two rows deserve prose. Patel's is the market's personality test: 1.21 million contracts of argument, more volume than either of the two markets that actually settled (Gabbard about 688,000, Blanche about 582,000), attached to a price that says he probably stays. That is a market that loves debating a name without believing the exit is likely, the pattern a DFS player recognizes from a chalky narrative play whose projection never supports the hype. Gleason's row is the opposite: barely 58,600 contracts, and the highest undecided price on the board at 42%. My read on that number is structural rather than newsy. She runs the DOGE Service as an acting administrator, and acting titles are built to end; the contract does not care whether the ending is a confirmation, a replacement, or a wind-down, only that she permanently stops holding the role.

Why Leavitt Trades At 99.5 And Not 100

Leavitt's resignation was announced by the president himself on August 12, with an exit set for the end of the month and an outside advisory role to follow. So why is the contract not at 100? Because it pays when she actually vacates the role, not when the departure is announced. The market holds back roughly half a cent for the small worlds where the plan changes before the door closes. Gabbard's contract already ran that full script this year: she announced in late May that she was stepping down as Director of National Intelligence, citing a family health matter, and the contract settled yes in mid-June once she vacated the role, ahead of her originally announced June 30 date. Announcement, then vacancy, then settlement. Traders who understand that sequence stop reading a 99-cent contract as an automatic profit and start reading it as a short-dated, low-yield position, and the worked example below puts an exact number on it.

The Base Rate: The Board Prices A Floor, Not The Whole Year

One structural fact does more work here than any single price: three of 2026's five senior exits have no contract on this board, and none of them appears in the event's settled history, so those departures never paid a contract holder here. Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on March 5, the first Cabinet member forced out of the term (CNN, CBS News). He fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2, a move NBC News tied to the president's frustration with her handling of the Epstein files, which is what made Blanche acting attorney general. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned on April 20, a departure Government Executive reported came amid inspector-general misconduct investigations. Those are exactly the three department-secretary exits Brookings' 2026 Cabinet tracker logs, and the market listed none of them; the two departures it did price, Gabbard in June and Blanche's promotion in August, were the Cabinet-rank DNI and a deputy moving up. The practical read for a trader: the summed board in the next section is a floor on real turnover, not an estimate of it, because the exits this market has systematically missed are the ones nobody listed in advance. The context makes the floor high enough as it is. Brookings' turnover tracking counted zero Cabinet departures in calendar 2025 against two Cabinet positions in the first year of the 2017 term, with first-year senior staff turnover of 29% versus 35%; on the tracker's influential-decision-maker cut, 31% turned over in year one versus 8% under Biden and 9% under Obama. NBC News, citing the same Brookings data, reported this summer that Senate-confirmed departures have now passed the first term's pace. History says the calendar matters from here, too. In the 2018 version of this administration, Rex Tillerson was out in March and Jeff Sessions was gone the day after the November midterms. With midterms set for November 3, 2026, a post-election shuffle is the most reliable pattern in modern cabinet turnover, and it is the main reason the market keeps a floor of 15 to 20 cents under so many names that face no public pressure at all.

The Number The Headlines Miss: About Seven More Exits On This Board

Here is the payoff of treating prices as probabilities. Sum the implied probability of all 31 active contracts and you get about 7.25 expected yes settlements among these listed officials before 2027, Leavitt included; price it off every bid and it is 7.05, off every ask and it is 7.45, so the tight books keep the answer near seven any way you cut it. Strip out Leavitt and the remaining 30 names still add up to about 6.3. The expected value of a sum holds no matter how correlated the individual outcomes are, which makes this the market's cleanest single statement: not "Patel is in trouble" or "Wiles is safe," but that a White House with five senior exits already logged this year should finish with several more, spread across a long list of modest probabilities. The number I keep coming back to is the long tail. Of the 31 names, 23 sit below a 25% midpoint, and together those small prices add up to about four expected exits, roughly two-thirds of everything still undecided, the same way a GPP field's combined 2% darts quietly account for more total ownership than the chalk. No single one of those names is likely to leave; collectively, they are the story. Our guide to ownership and leverage on Kalshi works through why reading a board collectively beats reading it name by name.

How A Contract Price Becomes A Probability

For readers newer to event contracts than to lineups: each Yes contract pays $1.00 if the named official leaves their role before 2027 and $0 if they do not, so a price in cents reads directly as an implied probability. A 33-cent Patel Yes is a 33% market estimate. Two adjustments apply before treating the screen as a fair number. First, the spread: on thinner names here the bid and ask sit 2 cents apart, and the midpoint is only an estimate of where the market truly stands. Second, fees: Kalshi's standard taker fee is 0.07 times price times one minus price per contract, rounded up to the next cent on the order total, and it peaks near 50-cent prices while shrinking toward the extremes, so on any order where you take the offer, your effective odds are slightly worse than the screen. The expected-value habit from DFS transfers whole: the question is never who you think leaves, it is whether your probability beats the price after fees. Our primer on what transfers from DFS to prediction markets covers the rest of the translation.

A Worked Example: Patel At 33 Cents Vs. Leavitt At 99.6

At the August 12 asks: one hundred Patel Yes contracts at 33 cents cost $33.00 plus a taker fee of 0.07 x 100 x 0.33 x 0.67, which Kalshi rounds up to $1.55, for $34.55 committed. If Patel leaves the FBI before 2027 the position pays $100.00, a $65.45 profit; if he stays, the full $34.55 is gone. The fee moves the breakeven from 33% to about 34.6%, so the order only makes sense if you believe his true departure chance clears that. One hundred Leavitt Yes contracts at 99.6 cents cost $99.60 plus a rounded $0.03 fee, $99.63 committed, to win $0.37 if she leaves as announced. That is a 0.4% return in a few weeks against a near-total loss in the rare world where she stays, the split our GPP versus cash mindset piece maps onto contract prices. Describing these orders is not a recommendation to place either one; the point is the fee-adjusted math, and it is the reader's probability estimate that decides everything.

What Moves This Board Before December 31

Three catalysts, in the order I would weight them. First, the November 3 midterms: the post-midterm shuffle is the strongest calendar pattern in modern administration turnover, Sessions in 2018 was gone within a day of the vote, and these contracts run almost two months past this cycle's election. Second, promotion chains, which this event has already proven it prices one leg at a time. Blanche's exit from the deputy job was triggered by a vacancy above him, yet the board carries pairs like Susie Wiles at 34.5% and her deputy Stephen Miller at 15.5% as if the questions were unrelated; if a chief-of-staff vacancy opened, the deputy's contract is exactly where the Blanche mechanic would look for its next settlement. Third, the news cycles around the high-priced names, which the prices already digest faster than any page can. We have not put a model panel on this board yet, so there is no Stokastic verdict number here to compare against the market's; a future refresh will carry those verdicts next to the live prices, graded on the same public scoreboard as the panel calls on our Republican presidential nominee odds page. The closing callback belongs to the summed board: about seven more expected exits among these 31 names, most hiding under 25-cent prices, on an event that has already settled twice this year. Every political and sports board we track lives on the Stokastic prediction markets hub, and the succession question one level up has its own page in our 2028 presidential election odds. If you would rather run probability-versus-price weighting on a board that settles nightly, the MLB DFS projections, ownership, and stacks in the DataHub are the daily version of this exercise, and you can try the Stokastic Sims free to build the probabilities yourself.

Prices, volume, and rules text fetched from the live Kalshi book on August 12, 2026, event KXTRUMPADMINLEAVE-26DEC31. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated exchange available to adults 18+ in eligible states as of August 2026; availability varies by state, so check the platform's own eligibility screen. Turnover comparisons reference Brookings Institution tracking by Kathryn Dunn Tenpas as reported by NPR and NBC News; 2026 departure details per NBC News, CNN, and Government Executive. This page is market analysis, not a recommendation to trade any contract, and not financial advice.