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Evaluating presidential personnel and the Senate confirmation process in the first 100 days

An important task of any new administration is to fill agency political leadership positions. With more than 1,300 Senate-confirmed roles to fill, presidents must act expeditiously through the transition and into the early days of their term to vet and nominate candidates. 

During the most recent transition, President Donald Trump set a record pace among recent presidents in announcing candidates for these positions prior to Inauguration Day.  

With his first 100 days in office complete, now is a fitting time to evaluate whether this fast pace accelerated nominees’ movement through the Senate confirmation process. The short answer is no. 

Here are three key takeaways: 

• Historic pace of nominations: Trump surpassed his recent predecessors in naming and nominating candidates for Senate-confirmed positions. He also made more than four times as many nominations as he did in his first term. The president leveraged his first-term experience and four intervening years to plan to hit the ground running at the start of his second term. 

• Increased procedural delays: Trump has the most nominees confirmed in the first 100 days of a new administration since Barack Obama—even though Trump’s nominees are facing increased procedural barriers in the form of cloture and final recorded confirmation votes.  

• Time to confirmation will increase: Trump’s nominees have taken about as long as Joe Biden’s to be confirmed. We expect that confirmation delays will grow substantially throughout the remainder of the first year, as has occurred for each of the last seven administrations.  

Trump’s historic pace of nominations 

In his first 100 days, Trump made 292 nominations, more than four times as many nominations as he made in his first term and more than three times as many as George W. or George H.W. Bush. Biden came closest to Trump, making 213 nominations in the same time span.  

The pace of Trump’s nominations is so fast that he has surpassed or is close to matching the numbers set by some of his predecessors at the 200-day mark. At the 100-day mark, he has already made 60 more nominations than he had made at the 200-day mark in his first term. 

Confirmations moved forward with increased procedural barriers 

Despite this quick pace in making nominations, Trump has had roughly the same number of nominees confirmed in his first 100 days as his recent predecessors.  

So far, 57 of Trump’s nominees have been confirmed. Still, this is more than double the number of nominees that were confirmed—27—in his first term.  

Trump’s nominees faced significant procedural barriers in the first 100 days. Other than Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, every one of Trump’s confirmed nominees required a cloture vote to end debate on their nomination. Every nominee, including Rubio and Rollins, then needed to have a final recorded vote, rather than moving forward with a voice vote or unanimous consent approval.  

While these procedures have become increasingly necessary to confirm agency leadership, they are being used more pervasively than they were during the first 100 days of any prior administration. The reasons for this changing trend include increased partisanship, concerns about nominee qualifications, and objections to nominee paperwork or incomplete background checks.

Delays expected to rise throughout the first year 

On average, during the first 100 days, it took Trump’s nominees 43 days to be confirmed from the time their names were submitted to the Senate. It took Biden’s nominees an average of 50 days over this same period. These delays are around twice as long as it took Obama or George H.W. Bush’s nominees to be confirmed, and approximately four times as long as it took nominees under George W. Bush, Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan to be confirmed.  

Now that the highest level of Trump nominees are confirmed, we expect confirmation delays will continue to grow as more lower-level nominees are considered by the Senate. As noted above, the growth of cloture votes and final recorded votes for each nominee suggests that successive rounds of nominees may experience more confirmation delays. 

Indeed, by the end of year one, confirmation delays have at least doubled in each of the last seven administrations. For George W. Bush and Clinton, they more than tripled.

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