Cabinet-pick confi rmations taking longer

WASHINGTON — Nearly a month into his presidency, President Donald Trump’s Cabinet is not quite empty. But compared with where past administrations stood by this point, it’s nowhere near as full.

As of Thursday, 13 of Trump’s nominees had been confirmed by the Senate; among the seats still open are the secretaries of commerce, energy, and housing and urban development. It took 24 days to get Trump’s secretaries of veterans affairs and the Treasury confirmed. It took 18 days to get his

education secretary confirmed — after a contentious process that jammed Senate phone lines and spurred two Republicans to vote no. His pick for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, withdrew, although Trump quickly named Alexander Acosta for the slot on Thursday.

By contrast, during the first seven days of Barack Obama’s presidency, his secretaries of agriculture, education, energy, interior, VA, state, housing and urban development, transportation, treasury and the EPA were confirmed, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which tracks such data.

George W. Bush had most of those posts filled within 10 days of his inauguration.

For decades, presidential Cabinet confirmations were mostly pro forma: hold a hearing, take a vote, swear in the new secretary. The failure rate for nominations of Supreme Court justices has been 18 percent. The failure rate for Cabinet nominees? About 4 percent.

“I can’t get my Cabinet approved, even though they’re outstanding people,” Trump complained during a news conference Thursday. Speaking of Senate Democrats, he said: “That’s all they’re doing is delaying.”

Democrats haven’t hastened to support Trump’s picks, but at least part of the delay has been caused by the nominees. Many are new to public service and have never been vetted, and some have resisted filling out the paperwork that has been a staple of the confirmation process.

“If you go back historically and look at Cabinet nominees, frequently they are public servants with expertise in that particular area,” said Lauren C. Bell, a professor of political science at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, and a Bexley native. “Trump has tended toward people he knows in business.”

And those nominees “If you go back historically and look at Cabinet nominees, frequently they are public servants with expertise in that particular area. Trump has tended toward people he knows in business.” “tend to have financial portfolios that are much more complicated than the average public servant’s,” she said.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who has voted against eight of the 13 Trump nominees considered, said the problem primarily is the nominees.

Several, he said, have significant problems. He voted against Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price in part because of data showing Price buying and selling health-care stocks while he was a congressman working on committees that have jurisdiction over health care.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Brown said, misled the Senate Finance Committee on whether the bank he led ever participated in a controversial practice of signing mortgage-foreclosure documents without reviewing them, dubbed “robo-signing.”

“Eight years ago, Price would’ve dropped out,” Brown said. “Eight years ago, Mnuchin would’ve dropped out.”

But Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Democrats are “using the time they have under rules, and they are using every second of that. They have the right to do that. But I don’t think it’s right for the country.”

Portman and others say the resistance to the nominees is an unwelcome change from a long tradition of allowing a president to assemble a team. Portman voted for Mel Watt, Obama’s pick for HUD, and attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch out of respect for that tradition, he said.

However, Democrats have offered similar deference to Trump’s picks for secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, and veterans affairs, David Shulkin, among others, voting for them with minimal resistance.

Tom C. Korologos, a strategic adviser at the law firm DLA Piper who has helped shepherd more than 300 nominees through the confirmation procedure since the Nixon administration, said the process has become far more divisive.

“What’s happening today — I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “Democrats lost track of who won the election.”

He has helped both Democratic and Republican administrations with nominees. He’s even helped two appointed vice presidents, Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. His process involved “murder boards,” where the nominees faced questions in private so there were no surprises in public.

For example, Korologos said, he asked Rockefeller what he had in his background that might prove embarrassing. Rockefeller, known for his wealth, sheepishly admitted that he wasn’t as rich as people believed.

Later, Korologos asked another nominee to reveal what might be embarrassing in his past. The nominee flushed and sputtered: “How would anyone know that?” He later withdrew his name. “To this day, I don’t know if he was an ax murderer or what,” Korologos said.

Korologos said Trump’s vetting of his nominees “leaves a lot to be desired.”

“What they did to (Education Secretary Betsy DeVos), she should’ve had a better murder board and a better system about how she got through,” he said.

DeVos was confirmed only through a historic tie-breaking vote by Vice President Mike Pence.

Korologos said that when he worked with Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who was rejected, and Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, “we set up a war room. We dug through every civicassociation speech or college editorial.”

Lost in the debate over how long this is taking is what impact the vacancies are having on the government. Trump has, in all, about 700 positions to fill that are subject to Senate approval, including under secretaries and deputy secretaries, according to University of Akron political science professor David B. Cohen.

“I would argue those positions are just as important,” he said. “Those are the people actually running the department, as opposed to the Cabinet head, which is a nice, shiny toy but that doesn’t do a whole lot.”

“It matters,” said David Eagles, director of the Center for Presidential Transition at the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

“You need to have your entire team on the field to execute effectively,” he said. Not having the roles filled “is an issue of vulnerability.”

As Korologos put it: “Somebody’s gotta run the business.”