Delays fuel GOP blame game over Trump nominees

With less than two weeks until Donald Trump takes the oath of office, only a small handful of his nominees appear on track for immediate confirmation — sparking tensions between the Senate GOP and Trump's inner circle.

At a private lunch on Tuesday, Republican senators discussed whether they should — or even could, under law and Senate rules — advance Trump nominees without final FBI background checks, financial disclosures and other paperwork, according to a person in the room.

They discussed whether they could at least hold confirmation hearings without documents submitted, holding off on final action until the process is complete. And the subject of nominations could come up again Wednesday evening, when Trump meets with Republican senators on Capitol Hill.

The internal debate surrounds what has become an obsession for the president-elect and his top allies.

Soon after his victory in November, Trump and his allies pushed to get as many of his top officials confirmed on Day One as possible. Transition chair Howard Lutnick privately pushed Senate Republican leaders to make a splash with a bunch of Inauguration Day confirmations, according to a GOP aide, who like others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity to describe private discussions.

Trump loved the idea and proceeded to quickly announce key nominations for that very purpose. Yet several committee chairs have suggested it could be a week or more after the inauguration before key appointees see real progress, and a blame game is breaking out behind the scenes.

Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said a planned hearing for Trump’s attorney general pick, Pam Bondi, could be pushed back due to a delayed FBI background check. The Senate Intelligence Committee has not yet received a pre-hearing questionnaire from Director of National Intelligence designee Tulsi Gabbard, according to a person familiar with her confirmation, complicating plans to hold her hearing next week. (A spokesperson for Gabbard, Alexa Henning, said she is “working in lockstep” with the panel.)

Senate HELP Chair Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said much the same Tuesday about Education secretary pick Linda McMahon: “It really depends on us getting paperwork,” Cassidy said about the timeline. “Right now the hold seems to be on their side.”

Only a small handful of nominations — Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for secretary of State, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) for UN ambassador and John Ratcliffe for CIA director — appear to be in the conversation for potential Day 1 action.

As Cassidy intimated, the sniping is starting to bubble to the surface. Some Senate Republicans are privately bemoaning the Trump transition wasting time debating whether to conduct FBI background checks, which have long been standard procedure for high-level executive nominees. Distrustful of the FBI, Trump initially wanted to engage private firms instead, but Senate Republicans ultimately convinced him the confirmations would go smoother if he stuck with protocol.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has personally encouraged nominees in his meetings with them to get their paperwork in as fast as possible, according to a GOP official familiar with those conversations. Yet Republican aides say delays have persisted with some of them.

“If a nominee hasn't submitted their paperwork in a timely fashion, there's only so much the Senate can do,” said one of those GOP aides. “The Senate is doing everything we can to move forward, but there's just a lot of bureaucracy.”

Amid the tensions, Thune has privately told Republicans that it’s up to individual committee chairs to decide how to handle their nominees — to stick with the established process or press ahead without full documentation.

Those in the latter camp appear to include Energy and Natural Resources Chair Mike Lee (R-Utah), who has moved to schedule a Jan. 14 hearing for Energy secretary nominee Doug Burgum over the objections of panel Democrats. They said Wednesday that they had not yet received Burgum’s paperwork.

“This is a breach of protocol and precedent, established over decades by Chairs of both parties,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the panel’s top Democrat, said.

Lee appears to be part of a bloc that “sees it like, we just need to move ahead and, you know, when these documents come in, they come in,” said one of the aforementioned Republican aides.

But other Republicans are balking at overriding longstanding committee rules. What’s the point of holding a hearing, they say, without having all the necessary information in hand?

“We think it's important because we think it helps the individuals move through the process more smoothly than if they didn't have it,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said Tuesday. “It just makes it a lot simpler to get through the process.”

The paperwork questions have been especially sensitive for nominees and committees related to national security. Trump advisers have been pushing Senate Republicans to prioritize those confirmations, especially after last week’s terror attack in New Orleans.

“The threats aren’t taking a pause while the Senate kinda thinks about it,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), the incoming national security adviser, said on Fox News last week. “We need them now.”

Asked Tuesday whether background checks are a prerequisite for hearings, Intelligence Chair Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who is handling the Gabbard and Ratcliffe nominations, had two words: “No comment.”

The sense of urgency from Trump and his allies doesn’t necessarily correspond to the recent historical record on early Cabinet confirmations. In 2017, he saw only two nominees confirmed on his first day: Defense Secretary James Mattis and Homeland Secretary Secretary John Kelly.

Most others — including his selections for attorney general and secretaries of State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, HHS, Commerce and Education — came in February, with still others seeing confirmation later in the spring.

President Joe Biden lagged further behind. He had no nominees confirmed on Jan. 20, 2021. Three were confirmed in January, five in February and the rest in March.

But Senate Republicans are looking to move faster amid fears that the Trump pressure campaign could mount, which has caused “anxiety” among committee chairs, the previously mentioned GOP aide told us. So far Trump himself has suggested Democrats are to blame for any delays — not his own team’s documentation snafus. But there are signs that the pressure is about to turn to Senate Republicans.

Thune has privately spoken about wanting to return to the “Obama-era” confirmation standard, referring to the nearly dozen nominees President Barack Obama saw confirmed during his first week in office. As POLITICO reported Tuesday, he has started conversations with Democrats about trying to move noncontroversial nominees quickly that first week.

But Thune is also protective of the Senate’s prerogatives — and the wishes of his members who want to preserve them.

“I think you give great deference and latitude to a president when it comes to people he wants to put into key positions,” Thune said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. “But the Senate has a role: advise and consent. … We have a lot of our senators who take that role very seriously.”

Jordain Carney, John Sakellariadis, Ursula Perano and Mackenzie Wilkes contributed to this report.