What Trump Can Do If His Nominees Are Rejected

Democrats are threatening to slow down all of Donald Trump’s nominees to keep him from implementing his agenda. He could appoint nominees with recess appointments but has met a lot of resistance.

Trump wrote on Truth Social:

We just won a Historic Landslide and Mandate from the American People, but Senate Democrats are organizing to improperly stall and delay the confirmation process of many of our Great Nominees. They will try all sorts of tricks starting very soon. Republicans must not allow them to do that. We have a Country to run and many big problems to solve, mostly created by Democrats. REPUBLICANS, BE SMART AND TOUGH!!!

Do we really think Republicans will cooperate?

Using the Federal Vacancies Reform Act

According to BBS News, Trump could temporarily place those loyal to him in high-ranking positions without Senate approval: a 25-year-old federal law that sets the rules for presidents to tap acting officials to fill vacant positions requiring Senate confirmation.

Enacted in 1998, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, or the Vacancies Act, limits the number of government employees who can temporarily fill the roughly 1,300 federal offices that require nomination by the president and approval by the Senate.

Some of Donald Trump’s most important picks, like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert Kennedy, face opposition.

About 1300 critical appointments still require Senate approval, and if Trump defies them, they could dig their heels in.

“Congress has made the policy choice to have about 1,300 positions still require Senate consent,” said Thomas Berry, a legal scholar at the Cato Institute. “But what we have now is that any given time, half or more than half of those are filled not by Senate-confirmed people, not because Congress made that policy choice, but because the Vacancies Act can be pushed to the limit and maybe even beyond its limits, and it’s so easy to have acting officers or sub-delegates essentially act in exactly the same way they would if they were Senate confirmed for years at a time.”

Eventually, there will be Senate-confirmed officials in lower-level positions and those at the highest pay grade who have served in their agencies for more than 90 days. Those officials could be then tapped for acting positions, Berry said.

“The vacancies people should be more concerned about, the vacancies where Trump has a lot more flexibility, are the ones that occur in the middle of the term, not right on day one,” he said.