NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - The dust has started to settle on President Bush's recent reshuffle of his White House team. Gone are Karl Rove and Scott McClellan. Gone too, it turns out, is President Bush's credibility as a free trader.

Bush has always claimed to be a staunch defender of free trade. "Keeping America competitive requires us to open more markets for all that Americans make and grow. One out of every five factory jobs in America is related to global trade, and we want people everywhere to buy American," he told the nation in January's State of the Union address.

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Yet whenever Bush's supposed free trade principals collide with a political priority, guess what loses out? In his first term, the best example of this was steel tariffs. Lately, free traders fretted after Bush backed down on the Dubai Ports deal in the face of opposition from within his own party.

But the clearest evidence of what Bush really thinks about free trade came on April 18 when he decided to move Rob Portman from trade rep to budget director.

The White House portrayed the move as part of a series of staff changes intended to send the message that President Bush, aware of his Death Valley poll numbers, was "shaking things up." But trade ministers from Europe to Brazil to India saw the decision as a sign Bush was throwing in the towel on trade talks he had once claimed were "vital."

Before he became U.S. trade rep, Portman was a six-term Ohio Congressman known for his close ties to the Bush administration and his ability to build bridges with Democrats to accomplish tough tasks, such as reforming the IRS. Although in the trade job for only a year, he helped the Central American Free Trade Agreement squeak through Congress (it passed the House by two votes) and he tried to jump start stalled World Trade Organization talks with a bold offer to slash U.S. agricultural subsidies.

No one disputes that Portman's replacement, Susan Schwab, is a talented trade expert. But she doesn't have Portman's clout, either on Capitol Hill or with foreign trade ministers. Without Portman's leadership, the administration may have trouble rounding up the votes to approve a number of trade deals, such as those Portman has inked with Peru and Columbia, to provide preferential treatment for goods from those countries and lower their tariff barriers to US products.

And while negotiations over a new world trade pact were sputtering, Portman's departure may prove a fatal blow.

"The timing suggested to everyone around the world that this wasn't important to the administration," says Susan Esserman, a former deputy trade rep.

The Bush administration might have avoided sending that signal if it had a few more qualified hands to draw on. But Bush has had trouble attracting top notch economic talent, largely because of the perception that these experts have little say in shaping policy.

Just ask former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who recounted to author Ron Suskind in his book "The Price of Loyalty," just how marginalized he had been during his two years as part of the Bush administration. O'Neill described a White House in which political operatives and ideologues, not cabinet secretaries and experts, controlled policy.

So it's no surprise that April saw another flurry of reports (the second wave since Bush's re-election) that the president was looking to replace Treasury Secretary John Snow with a Wall Street heavy hitter, but that he'd so far found no takers.

And when Bush promoted budget director Josh Bolten to be White House chief of staff, the president was again forced to dive into his shallow talent pool. Portman was an obvious choice to push Bush's tax cuts and beleaguered budget on Capitol Hill. But he may have also been the only choice. And that has turned this ostensible political shake-up into yet another break-down for free trade.

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