Partnership for Public Service Calls for Reduction in Number of Senate-Confirmed Appointees, Highlights Trends in Senate Confirmation Process
An August 9, 2021 report from the Partnership for Public Service argues that Senate confirmations of political appointees to fill vacancies are a slow and time-consuming process and many positions should not require Senate confirmation at all.
The report details a number of trends and patterns in the Senate confirmation process. First, the number of Senate-confirmed positions grew from 779 to 1,237, a 59 percent increase, between 1960 and 2016. Second, the confirmation process takes longer than ever before, and third, vacancies in Senate-confirmed positions have significantly increased.
During the Obama and George W. Bush administrations, Senate-confirmed nominees spent about 165,000 cumulative days (452 years) stuck in the confirmation process. Similarly, nominees spent about 80,000 days (219 years) in the process during Trump’s term.
Since political appointees serve relatively short terms, it makes little sense that they be mired in the confirmation process for so long, the report argues. When the Senate takes time to confirm these nominees, it slows overall government effectiveness, responsiveness and agility, according to the Partnership.
The Partnership offered several solutions to the current state of the confirmation process. Converting Senate-confirmed positions to nonconfirmed presidential appointments, assigning more Senate-confirmed positions to fixed-length terms, and converting political appointments to nonpolitical career roles are a few examples.
“The reality is we should be able to cut more than half of those positions,” said Partnership President and CEO Max Stier on Government Matters. “We need fewer Senate-confirmed positions and also fewer overall political positions, we have 4000 of those and that also creates its own set of issues.”
While the absence of a senior political appointee does not directly affect many employees in completing their day-to-day jobs, it can lead to career senior executives stepping into these roles on an acting basis and the lack of function of some entities. For example, the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) has not had a quorum for more than four years, and it now has a backlog of 3,365 pending appeals. Many of these cases involve whistleblowers.
