Today marks the 100th day of Donald Trump’s presidency. He promised an action-packed first 100 days during which he would repeal and replace Obamacare, reform taxes, label China as a currency manipulator, reform school choice and drain the swamp, just to name a few of his promises. With such an ambitious agenda, you would think that appointing qualified people to vital government jobs would be a priority for the Trump administration. That, however, doesn’t seem to be the case. Out of the 554 key jobs that require Senate confirmation, Trump’s administration has only put forward 79 nominees, and only 24 of those have been appointed.
This means that the administration still has to put forth 475 nominees and that is just to fill the jobs that require congressional approval. Apart from those, there are thousands of political appointees that need to be hired as well and Trump’s cabinet nominee for Labor secretary hasn’t been confirmed by the Senate yet either.
The Trump administration has been slower at filling the Cabinet than the previous six administration
One of the departments that is seriously understaffed right now is the State Department, where over 100 positions haven’t been filled leaving many embassies without ambassadors. This isn’t only because they haven’t hire anyone yet, Trump fired dozens of Obama appointed ambassadors on the day of his inauguration and has yet to fill those vacancies that he created. An understaffed State Department is especially concerning due to the many foreign policy issues that the Trump administration is currently dealing with like North Korea and the war in Syria. The lack of people qualified and experienced people in the State Department and embassies all around the world makes it harder for the U.S. to use all its Diplomatic tools to solve international conflicts.
The graphic below, created by the Partnership for Public service and the Washinton post, illustrates how large the number of vacancies is. (As of day 95, Trump does have a secretary of agriculture, which isn’t shown in the graphic.)
The lack of appointments has been credited to a few things that all can be traced back to the absence of people with government experience in Trump’s administration. Trump’s staff is overworked, inexperienced and so divided that there have been reports of clashes between “the White House’s different coalitions” and a person close to the white house told Politico that “… a sense of “paranoia” has taken over amid fears that disloyal hires might undercut Trump’s agenda or leak to the press.” The White House clearly isn’t functioning properly.
The process has also been slowed considerably due to the fact that Trump reportedly wants to personally sign off on every single nominee. Normally lower level political appointments are hired by the head of the personnel office, not the commander in chief, according to an Obama Offical.
The nomination process has been described as “a medieval court” by a source close to the White House.
To be fair to Trump, he did promise “a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health)”, but right now there are so many positions left unfilled that it is hindering the government from functioning properly.
Trump has accused democrats of slowing him down by blocking his nominees, but the truth is that Trump clearly hasn’t nominated that many people for the Democrats to block. Trump’s failure to fill important administration positions is seriously hurting his ability to push his legislative agenda. This is especially clear today, on his 100th day in office with no legislative accomplishments to show for it.
