Dems not all that’s delaying nominees
Trump sees obstruction; other factors also at play
WASHINGTON – When President Trump talks about the hundreds of vacancies scattered across his administration he’s clear about where he places the blame: “Obstructionist” Democrats, he says at rallies and on Twitter, are slow walking his picks.
A review by USA TODAY of the president’s most-delayed appointments, including some who have been waiting for nearly a year, finds a more nuanced explanation that involves timing, concerns about an agency’s direction and, sometimes, opposition from Republicans.
Trump’s appointment to head the Central Intelligence Agency’s office of inspector general has faced questions from Republicans. A proposed ambassador has languished over bipartisan inertia. A nominee to the Department of Health and Human Services was waylaid as lawmakers focused instead on the president’s tax overhaul.
Trump has ratcheted up pressure on the Senate, and Republicans are considering a more aggressive sched-
ule to get caught up on lingering nominations for hundreds of mid-level jobs that run the day-to-day operations at federal agencies.
“Waiting for approval of almost 300 nominations, worst in history,” Trump tweeted recently. “Democrats are doing everything possible to obstruct, all they know how to do.”
Trump has a point: The Senate has taken more time to clear his nominees than those of his recent predecessors — 85 days on average compared with 67 days for President Obama, according to the non-partisan Partnership for Public Service.
A little more than 420 Trump appointees have been confirmed compared with 652 at this point in George W. Bush’s presidency.
Experts noted the White House got off to a slow start and has yet to announce candidates for hundreds of other positions.
“Some of it is partisanship, some of it isn’t,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service. He said far too many political appointments require Senate approval.
“Some of it is Republicans who don’t like what they see and want to negotiate something out of it,” Stier said.
“Some of it is partisanship, some of it isn’t. Some of it is Republicans who don’t like what they see and want to negotiate something out of it.”
Max Stier
Republican concerns
Though Trump’s pick to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, won confirmation last week, another agency nominee has been stalled for months.
Christopher Sharpley was named in September as the CIA’s inspector general but was ensnared in a controversy over whistle-blower protections.
In Sharpley’s case, it is opposition from Republicans — not Democrats — that is most notable. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, co-signed a letter last year citing investigations into whether Sharpley punished whistleblowers.
During a hearing last fall, Sharpley said he wasn’t aware of the investigations.
Grassley questioned that testimony, writing that investigators had sought to speak with Sharpley for months and that they visited his office to review documents.
“It’s pretty clear he was misrepresenting his knowledge of the reprisal complaints against him,” said John Tye of Whistleblower Aid, a Washing- ton-based group that represents two former CIA employees who filed complaints against Sharpley.
Agency record
Stephen Vaden was among the first Trump allies to land at the Department of Agriculture last year, part of the “beachhead” team charged with helping the new administration get its hands around the 84,000-plus employee bureaucracy.
His nomination to be the department’s top lawyer, which was sent to Capitol Hill in September, has stalled for nearly nine months.
Almost a dozen others nominated for Agriculture posts have breezed past Vaden on their way to unanimous confirmation.
Public opposition has come from Democrats, and it centers on two issues: the reassignment of senior career staff at USDA and Vaden’s prior legal work on a voter registration law in North Carolina that a federal court struck down for targeting African-American voters with “almost surgical precision.”
Vaden, a Tennessee native, has Democratic opposition but also Democratic support. Three Democrats supported him in committee.
“If it was just Democrats then it would seem Republicans would have already approved him,” said Jeff Streiffer with an American Federation of Government Employees union that represents lawyers in the office.
Vaden has said his work on the voter registration law was assigned to him by superiors.
Timing is key
Trump tapped Lynn Johnson in June as assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, where she would oversee a budget of $58 billion. Her delay appears to be a victim of timing more than partisanship.
Johnson, who runs a county public assistance office in Colorado, was referred to the Senate Finance Committee just as it was gearing up to write Trump’s sweeping tax overhaul, which the president signed months later.
That’s a common problem for Congress and any White House, said David Lewis, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University. And it underscores the need to move nominations early in a new presidential term, he said.
Controversial office
When Winslow Sargeant was nominated by Obama to be the chief counsel for advocacy at the Small Business Administration in 2009, the path to confirmation was anything but direct.
It took the Senate more than two years to confirm him for the job.
So Sargeant said he’s not at all surprised Trump’s nominee for the post, David Tryon, also confronts delay.
Tryon, an attorney, was nominated in October to lead an office that has long been controversial, regardless of who’s in the White House.
The position was created to be an independent advocate for small business and can weigh in on federal regulations from any agency if they have an impact on small companies. That alone makes the office a target for opposition.
Sargeant said there is an institutional roadblock for the office that has little to do with politics: Because it is set up to be independent of the White House, its nominees often don’t get much support from senior administration officials.