The Senate set a modern-day record for confirming a president’s Cabinet appointments on Tuesday when they voted to confirm former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Ore., as secretary of labor.
The confirmation of Chavez-DeRemer means that all federal government Cabinet departments now have a Trump appointee leading them. The only Cabinet-level official yet to be confirmed by the Senate is Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., whose confirmation to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has been delayed owing to the slim Republican majority in the House of Representatives.
If Stefanik is confirmed before May, then Trump will beat his 2017 record for Cabinet-level officials in his first term.
In a statement to The Daily Signal, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., highlighted what the latest confirmation means for the Senate.
“I have said from the very beginning that a president deserves to have his Cabinet in place and working on behalf of the country as soon as possible, and the Senate has been able to confirm President Trump’s nominees at a record pace,” Thune said.
“The Senate has followed an aggressive schedule, and we have stayed in session on nights and weekends, which forced Democrats to make concessions that allowed us to speed up the process,” he said, adding:
Senate Republicans and President Trump are committed to delivering on the decisive mandate we received from Americans last November, and that started by getting President Trump’s team in place quickly so we can get to work on advancing our shared agenda.
The Thune-led Senate pace is faster than the confirmation rate for Trump’s first term, as well as faster than that of President Joe Biden’s sole term.
Tom Jipping, a senior legal fellow at the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, noted in a recent article that the Senate’s record pace for confirmations happened despite tremendous resistance on the part of Senate Democrats.
Jipping pointed out that forcing cloture votes now serves no other purpose than to delay the process of confirmation. He calculated that Trump’s Cabinet faced an unprecedented number of delays by Senate Democrats.
“Democrats forced a cloture vote on 19 of the 21 executive branch nominations confirmed so far, compared to eight in 2021, and zero in either 2009 or 2001,” Jipping wrote, referring to the first year of the presidencies of Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush, respectively.
Jipping also noted that the intentional delaying of Cabinet confirmation votes is a marked escalation from as recently as 2001, when the Senate “confirmed seven of President George W. Bush’s executive branch nominations on the same day he made them.”
Dragging out the confirmation process for political purposes will continue to affect Trump’s Make America Great Again priorities due to the need for sub-Cabinet officials to be confirmed by the Senate. According to a report from 2016, there are 1,212 senior government officials who need to be approved by the Senate. They include a range of deputy, assistant, and undersecretaries in Cabinet departments, U.S. ambassadors, and the heads of federal executive agencies that exist outside of the Cabinet departments, and the Executive Office of the President.
According to a Washington Post and Partnership for Public Service tracker, which is covering 818 positions of the more than 1,200 government officials needing Senate approval, 178 nominees are being considered by the Senate right now. Some 27 nominees have been confirmed, while 29 picks are awaiting formal nomination.
Government officials below the initial Cabinet level are crucial to implementing the president’s agenda. One undersecretary nominee is already receiving attention for the experience he will bring to bear in the Department of Defense. Elbridge Colby, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development during the first Trump administration, recently won the endorsement of The Heritage Foundation to be the next undersecretary of defense for policy.
In a statement to The Daily Signal, Heritage Action Executive Vice President Ryan Walker said, “Heritage Action and our millions of grassroots activists supported President Trump and his slate of nominees with a swift Senate confirmation process through a $1 million advocacy campaign that targeted the home states of key senators, who had the potential to make or break the confirmation process for these highly capable nominees.”
Walker added: “The new Republican Senate majority united to deliver President Trump’s Cabinet nominees at a historic pace. The real work on implementing the America First agenda begins now.”
