The ax fell Friday on Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, whose private jet travel conjured images of the swamp that President Donald Trump has promised to drain.

The White House announced Price had resigned and that Trump had accepted it. Effective 11:59 p.m. Friday, Deputy Assistant Secretary Don Wright will become acting secretary.

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According to a source close to White House aides, the leading candidates to replace Price are Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin and Alex Azar, who served as deputy health and human services secretary under George W. Bush.

Trump telegraphed the resignation earlier Friday when he alluded to an announcement that would be coming later in the day. He told reporters on the White House lawn Price was a good man but declined to say whether he still had confidence in him.

“It’s not a question of confidence,” the president said. “I was disappointed because I didn’t like it, cosmetically or otherwise. I was disappointed.”

Here is a look at the candidates to replace Price:

  • Shulkin, 58, who had served as president and chief executive officer of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City and president of Morristown Medical Center earlier in his career. In 2015, then-President Barack Obama tapped him to serve as undersecretary of state of veterans affairs for health. According to a New York Times story, he pushed his staff to cut down the time it would take to organize a summit to combat veteran suicides from 10 months to one. Trump nominated him in January to be secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, picking him over four other candidates.
  • Azar, a graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, who clerked for appellate Judge J. Michael Luttig and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in the early 1990s. He also worked on the first two years of the Whitewater investigation under independent counsel Ken Starr. That investigation, years after Azar left, resulted in then-President Bill Clinton’s impeachment for charges arising from his false statements about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Later, Azar worked for the Washington law firm of Wiley, Rein, and Fielding LLP. Under then-Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt in the Bush administration, he supervised all operations in the department. Azar later worked for five years as senior vice president of corporate affairs and communications at the drug company Eli Lilly and Co. From 2012 until January of this year, he was president of Lilly USA LLC, the company’s largest affiliate. Azar, who lives in Indianapolis, supported Jeb Bush in the 2016 presidential race. He was one of 30 people on the former Florida governor’s Indiana steering committee.

Trump picked Price, then a U.S. representative from Georgia, because of his medical background — he is a doctor — and his health care policy chops. As a congressman, he had developed a comprehensive legislative proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Trump hopes Price could help guide an Obamacare repeal through Congress.

But during his seven months on the job, the Senate failed to pass several iterations of repeal, and Obamacare appears as safe as ever.

Price suddenly found himself on shaky ground after Politico first reported he had used a private jet, at taxpayer expense, for official travel. Later revelations indicated that he had taken private planes more than two dozen times at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1 million.

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Trump reportedly was infuriated and not mollified by Price’s offer to pay the U.S. Treasury the cost of his seat on the planes. He told Trump in his resignation letter that he did not want to harm his agenda.

“I have spent 40 years both as a doctor and public servant putting people first,” he wrote. “I regret that the recent events have created a distraction from these important objectives.”

Trump’s response stands in sharp contrast to his reaction to an alleged ethical lapse that threatened to derail Price’s nomination. Democrats sharply criticized him for investments he made in health care companies. Price at the time insisted he had followed all of the congressional ethics rules, and the Senate confirmed him in February on a party-line 52-47 vote.

(photo credit, homepage image: Gage Skidmore, Flickr; photo credit, article image: Mark Taylor, Flickr)