- Today's pattern of obstruction,
it just isn't normal.
- The confirmation process has been record-setting long.
- Literally years -- years -- of partisan obstruction.
- Their obstruction is just unprecedented and unheralded.
- There are hundreds of vacancies
in the federal government,
not because of a lack of money or resources,
but because of inaction from congress
and from the president of the United States.
There are more than 1,000 positions
in the executive branch requiring Senate confirmation,
and clashes over these confirmations are nothing new.
But in recent years,
these clashes have become more frequent
and have lengthened the confirmation process.
- Presidential nominations, uh,
particularly to cabinet and sub-cabinet level,
have generally been pretty deferential to the president.
The biggest moment that it really changed
was 1989 when George HW Bush nominated John Tower,
a former senator, to be Secretary of Defense.
And this became the really first big cabinet
fight of the cable TV news era.
- You said Sunday you've never broken a pledge in your life.
Does this include wedding vows?
- As a matter of fact, I have broken wedding vows.
I think I'm probably not alone in that connection.
- Eventually he was voted down.
It was the big spark of this era.
There's no simple confirmation anymore.
George W Bush, almost his entire cabinet was confirmed
on the first or second day of his presidency.
Joe Biden didn't get his full cabinet
until well into the spring.
- If you go back several administrations,
many agency nominations were confirmed by unanimous consent.
In President Obama's first year and in President Trump's
first year, right, not a single agency nomination
was confirmed, uh, by unanimous consent.
- No single senator can actually
stop somebody from getting through,
but what they can do is extract a price.
They can require the Senate to take hours of time to debate --
time that the Senate doesn't have,
or that the Senate has to trade off against some other priority.
- The Senate has couple this heightened partisanship
by significantly increasing
the number of Senate-confirmed positions,
which have grown by more than 40% since 1960.
This growth has coincided with longer confirmation times,
more vacancies, and a greater willingness by the president
to rely on acting officials in the government.
- If you go all the way back to President Reagan,
it took, on average, about 60 days
for that nomination to get confirmed.
And by President Obama,
the time to confirm a successful nomination had doubled.
- The reason why we have acting appointees is because
the Senate confirmation process was taking so long.
This has been, uh, a trend that has been increasing
over the last five administrations.
- And efforts to expedite the confirmation process
have not always worked out as expected.
- November of 2013, Harry Reid pulled
what he called the nuclear option
in order to more quickly confirm executive
and judicial branch nominations.
- The Senate is a living thing.
And to survive, it must change.
- The year after the change, uh,
it took longer for agency nominations to get confirmed,
even though the vote threshold had lowered.
- Now what we're seeing is not only that presidents
are choosing to fill these positions with actings,
choosing to extend the time, uh, until they submit a nominee,
also the Senate is choosing to not move on these nominees
once they are submitted.
- In some extreme cases,
agencies have gone years without a permanent head.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services went
without a Senate-confirmed director for the final year
and a half of President Trump's term.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives
has not had a Senate-confirmed director since 2015,
which also happens to be the only Senate-confirmed
director in its history.
And the Food and Drug Administration
went without a commissioner nominee for the first
nearly 10 months of the Biden administration.
- These agencies are hollowed-out,
and I've heard from sources throughout the government
that that is, uh, a real, uh, road block
in trying to execute on the Biden agenda.
- For some, particularly in the Senate,
there's a sense that they are ensuring that their voice
is heard by having more Senate-confirmed positions.
The irony is that, by having such an overwhelming number,
actually, their h-- their voice is heard even less.
A-and that's because, um, they --
they're never getting to these people.
- Senators in both parties have slow-walked the process,
and it can really hurt, in terms of the quality of people
that really want to actually serve in these positions.