Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump blames Dems as top jobs stay unfilled
WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump seeks a historic meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a new trade pact with South Korea, he has yet to name an ambassador to the Korean Peninsula. Nearly every major Mideast capital has no U.S. ambassador. Amid a national gun debate, he has not chosen a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. His budget director is doing double duty as chief of a consumer agency.
Empty desks throughout the executive branch have heightened the sense of chaos in Trump’s administration and put the president on the defensive.
The president is blaming Democrats. He is increasingly targeting the minority party in public comments and on Twitter.
“Hundreds of good people, including very important Ambassadors and Judges, are being blocked and/or slow walked by the Democrats in the Senate,” Trump tweeted at midmonth.
It is true that Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had far more highlevel nominees confirmed by the Senate at this point in their terms. And Democrats in the Senate have thrown a fair amount of sand in the gears to lengthen the confirmation process.
Yet nonpartisan specialists who track the process give Trump most of the blame, both because he has been slow to submit nominations and because of the high turnover in senior administration positions.
More turnover could be coming. On Sunday, Trump confidant Christopher Ruddy told ABC’s “This Week” that the president told him the day before that “one or two major changes” could happen “very soon.”
Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, said that embattled Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin is “likely to depart the Cabinet very soon.”
According to the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, Trump has yet to nominate anyone for about one-third of the 640 jobs that the group has identified as “key positions” in the executive branch, not counting judicial and military posts.
Senate Democrats bear some responsibility. They approach the confirmation process still bitter over Senate Republicans’ move during the 2016 campaign, denying Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, even a hearing for nearly 10 months — successfully gambling that a Republican would be elected president to put a conservative on the court.
Also, as Democrats argue, an uncommon number of Trump nominees pose questions of competence, conflicts of interest or both.
The nonpartisan factchecking organization PolitiFact concluded that Trump’s claim that Democrats’ obstruction is the reason for the high-level vacancies is just “half true.” It gave the White House “low marks for its approach to executive appointments.”
In many cases, including the ambassadorships in Seoul and the Mideast, Trump has yet to announce a nomination. In other instances, he has fired people or they’ve resigned, which adds to the backlog. Also, Trump’s talent pool is smaller than usual, reflecting both his resistance to hiring Republican establishment figures who disparaged his candidacy and some Republicans’ unwillingness to work for him.
The majority of Trump’s key nominees have won Senate approval. Of the 424 key nominations he has sent to the Senate, nearly a third await confirmation.
As of March 23, after 14 months in office, Trump had sent 177 nominations to the Senate that were awaiting confirmation. At the same point in his presidency, Obama had 173 pending, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which has been tracking the figures in collaboration with The Washington Post. But Obama had made more nominations overall, and gotten more confirmed.
Another factor working against Trump: The Senate is taking longer to deal with his nominations. As of March 23, Trump nominees on average took 84 days to win confirmation, while Obama nominees on average got through in 65 days.
During the Obama administration, Senate Democrats became so fed up with Republicans’ obstructions that in 2013, they changed Senate rules, reducing the number of votes needed to bring up a nomination for debate and confirmation from 60 to 51.
That provoked Republicans — then the minority party — to use other procedural options to at least delay nominees if they couldn’t block them. Democrats are doing the same now. Yet any senator can secretly put a “hold” on a nominee to stop action, and Republicans have done so — to oppose the individual, extract some unrelated concession from the president or retaliate for some perceived wrong.