Some Biden nominees languished in Senate limbo for hundreds of days

It took 505 days on average for President Joe Biden’s nominees for six undersecretary posts at the Pentagon to be confirmed by the Senate, according to new research from the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. The report underscores the growing challenges modern presidents face in getting their teams in place to manage a sprawling government and implement their agenda.

The group, which is advocating for Congress to reduce the overall number of confirmed positions to improve the way government functions, analyzed the “layers” of political appointees requiring Senate confirmation at five major Cabinet agencies in a new paper shared first with Semafor. The Pentagon has five “layers” of Senate-confirmed roles (not counting the different military branches), while the Departments of Commerce, Energy, State, and Treasury each have four.

According to the research, it took appointees in layers three and four an average of 350 days and over 400 days, respectively, to be confirmed under Biden. That’s compared to the 18 and 67 days on average it took to confirm officials at the top two levels: secretary and deputy secretary.

While these roles don’t merely go vacant when a nominee is waiting for Senate action — they are usually filled with acting officials — these workarounds come at a cost. Valerie Boyd, who leads the partnership’s Center for Presidential Transition, argued these interim officials aren’t set up for success because they are often doing two jobs. A lack of a confirmed agency head can also inspire legal challenges or delay long-term planning decisions. And the more the path to a federal appointment looks like a slog, the less likely qualified applicants will want to start it, especially when they may already be giving up more lucrative private sector work for public service.

“When there are delays in confirmations of a president’s leadership team, you’re discouraging talented people from taking roles,” Boyd told Semafor.

The number of Senate-confirmed positions has ballooned overtime and it’s getting harder and harder for presidents to get their teams quickly confirmed. Boyd told me it’s taken Biden nominees, on average, twice as long to get through the Senate as nominees under President George W. Bush.

But just because the pace has slowed dramatically doesn’t mean the government will actually do anything about it. Senators have taken their “advise and consent” function especially seriously in recent years and are more likely to throw up procedural hurdles against even relatively low-level nominees than they have in the past. They are unlikely to want to relinquish the power they have to influence a president’s nominee choices or, in other cases, their ability to hold up nominees as a way to pressure an administration to take some other action. Roadblocks have become more and more popular in the upper chamber (see Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s, R-Ala. now-dropped hold on military promotions over the Pentagon’s abortion policy).

“One of the real problems here is that the confirmation process has become a killing field for members on both sides who are anxious to take as many hostages as possible in order to get whatever they want out of the administration,” Jim Manley, the former communications director for the late Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., told me. While Manley said he supports reducing the number of Senate-confirmed positions, he doubted the chamber would go there.

Congress did pass a bill eliminating the need for Senate confirmation for some 170 executive branch positions in 2012 under President Obama (and in the heat of an election year, no less). So action is possible here, even in politically divisive times. That legislation was cosponsored by Chuck Schumer, then the Senate Rules Committee chair, and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.