There are about 1300 positions in the executive branch that currently require U.S. Senate confirmation, and the Washington Post is publishing an interesting and dynamic tracker to study 822 of these positions and their progress.
At this writing, just over six months into President Trump’s second term, he has nominated 357 people to these roles, and only 107 have been confirmed, meaning that about 250 appointees are still awaiting Senate action.
The easy thing to do would be to attack the Senate.
The Senate is almost always a fair target, with plenty of party hacks, geriatrics, fools and grifters to give an argument color. But there are plenty of thoughtful, intelligent patriots in there too, such as Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Mike Lee, John Kennedy and Rand Paul. So to slam the Senate unconditionally might be unfair.
The fact is, there are a lot of reasons why relatively few positions have been confirmed so far, among them:
- There are some Republicans who dislike/disapprove of the Trump administration and want to be gadflies.
- Virtually the entire Democratic Party wants to stand in the way of everything the Trump administration attempts (note that most Democrats vote against every Republican nominee, while most Republicans vote to confirm most Democrat appointees, no matter how odious).
- The Senate has some peculiar traditions regarding confirmations, such as the “blue slip” process, in which the Senators of the state where a federal judge will be located have the privilege of vetoing or otherwise holding up judicial nominations.
- 1300 positions is an enormous number of positions to go through, in terms of traditional committee considerations and confirmation hearings. If we allow each nominee just an hour each – nowhere near enough time for even a cursory evaluation – that’s 1300 hours right there. That’s 162.5 traditional eight-hour workdays. There are only 260 potential workdays in a year of five-day weeks, after all, without even allowing for vacations and holidays.
- But perhaps most importantly, the Senate has a lot more work to do than just confirming presidential appointees! Every bill passed by the House must be debated and voted on by the Senate. The Senate has to consider treaties, manage investigations, provide oversight to each federal department and major agencies, and be prepared to set all these aside to consider cases of impeachment (which hardly ever arise, but certainly ought to be far more frequent).
In short, there simply isn’t time for the US Senate to have a robust consideration of every nominee that requires Senate approval. There aren’t enough hours in the day, and there is too much else for the Senate to do…
…especially when we consider that hardly any appointee is every rejected.
Yes, some are rejected, but it’s incredibly rare. Almost every appointee chosen by every president gets in eventually. This means, objectively speaking, that in the vast majority of cases, the process is either a needless delay, a pointless waste of time, or both.
Why?
Why is it this way, and why do we put up with it?
The main problem is simply this: when the Framers came up with the concept of advice and consent by the US Senate, they did not envision this large a government; they did not envision this level of partisanship, and they did not envision each individual confirmation process requiring as lengthy a hearing and evaluation process as has developed.
We should always step back and ask ourselves, would the Framers have designed it this way if they had known it would turn out like this?
Clearly, the answer is no. The Framers gave the Senate multiple duties in addition to the “advise and consent” function; obviously they intended the Senators to have enough time to perform those other duties.
In fact, the Framers provided an out, for this exact problem. Consider the text of Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 2 (speaking here of the President’s duties):
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
In the final clause, we see that the Congress is clearly given the flexibility to waive the confirmation process on most of these positions. If Congress so chose, Congress could limit the Senate’s confirmation process to, say, federal judges, cabinet secretaries, and, oh, ambassadors to our top ten trading partners perhaps, allowing the President to make all other appointments on the spot without Senate involvement.
Or Congress could provide the Senate with a version of the pocket veto, allowing the President to make all those lesser appointments on probation, with the Senate reserving the right to call for a vote on a specific appointee within thirty or sixty days, perhaps, and if they don’t, confirmation could be considered automatic.
In short, the Constitution gives Congress great latitude to correct this mess.
We must always remember that our federal government is a completely different beast than it was in the Founding era, when we had just four federal departments and members of the Supreme Court rode circuit to double as district judges.
And besides, the Senate itself is, today, a completely different body than it was 250 years ago, due to the horrific error known as the 17th amendment.
The Framers intended the Senate to be the representative of the state governments, looking out for the interests of their own respective states, with a potential veto on bad federal policy and bad federal appointments. But the result of the 17th Amendment was to completely sever the ties between the state governments and the federal; now that our Senators are publicly elected in a general election, their decision to delay, grill, or rubber stamp the publicly elected President’s appointees serves little purpose, either practically or philosophically.
If the process of Senate confirmation served any useful purpose – if for example it had stopped the appointments of such clearly corrupt, compromised or incompetent officers as Eric Holder and Merrick Garland, Hillary Clinton and John Brennan, Jennifer Granholm and Alejandro Mayorkas – then perhaps it would be worth retaining, for all its challenges.
But the process so rarely stops anyone, it needs an overhaul. One-eighth of President Trump’s four-year term is already over, and there are hundreds of appointees who can’t start to implement his policies yet.
This hamstringing of the presidency serves some limited purpose when a bad president is installed, but it’s an inexcusable obstacle when a good president is trying to hit the ground running.
It is long past time for the U.S. Senate to streamline the process for all but the most senior appointees, and race these appointments through unless individual cases truly merit a public grilling.
While we’re in the process of reforming our government, let’s put this important reform on the front burner as well.
Copyright 2025 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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