Inauguration Day is still more than a month away, but President-elect Donald Trump’s administration has already begun. His first running mate, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, had to ignore after a week, between the accusations paid for sex with underage girls. And last week, reports surfaced Trump can replace his nominee For Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, former Fox News host, amid the turmoil allegations of sexual assault and other concerns about him fitness for the office.
It’s a turn back human resource mix that marked Trump’s previous session at the White House. In his first four years, Trump had more failed Cabinet appointments than any president since at least Jimmy Carter, and this time, he’s already the fastest president (elect) in decades to have a failed Cabinet nominee.
Failed cabinet appointments are a rite of passage for presidents: Every president since Carter has had at least one of his cabinet appointees fail to be confirmed by the Senate. (Most, like Gaetz, withdrew rather than face a tough confirmation battle, but one — former Sen. John Tower, former President George HW Bush’s first choice for defense secretary — did. he threw it back.)
But Trump set a modern record in his first term when six* of the nominees for Cabinet-level jobs were considered today. Former President Bill Clinton is second with four failed nominations***, with former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama each having three. Every other president since Carter had exactly one.
Trump’s Cabinet mistakes started early.
Katie Marriner for 538
Of course, these numbers represent candidates who withdrew during the entire term of previous presidents, and Trump’s second term has not yet begun. As the chart above shows, it is common for presidents to start a Cabinet nominee when their presidency begins, or even earlier. Obama also had three: the initial pick for secretary of health and human services and the first two Elections for Secretary of Commerce. (For what it’s worth, this didn’t seem to have a negative impact on his presidency. Obama’s average acceptance rating remained above 60 percent until May 2009, and the 2009–10 Congress the most fruitful in history.)
But Trump has already outpaced Obama. Obama’s first nominee for secretary of commerce, then-governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, He left on January 4, 2009. Gaetz retired on November 21, 2024. In fact, Gaetz retired faster than any other Cabinet member in the last 50 years.
And while we’re not sure what will happen in the future, Trump seems to have a good chance of tying or breaking Obama’s record of three nominees early in a presidency. There’s plenty of time left, and plenty of controversial cabinet appointments that could make for a difficult path to confirmation, such as Hegseth. anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.candidate for secretary of health and human services, and Former Rep. Tulsi GabbardCandidate for Director of National Intelligence.
It could be especially embarrassing for Trump, given that his party will hold a 53-47 majority in the upcoming Senate. But historically, most cabinet elections have not torpedoed the opposing party; have withdrawn in front of (potential) resistance from on their side. Since the Carter administration, when the Senate was controlled by the president’s party, seventeen of his Cabinet nominations have failed.
Instead, most of the failed Cabinet appointments fell through because of a scandal surrounding the nominee. It is a subjective exercise to try to pin down the failure of all past Cabinet appointments to a single reason, but in my opinion, 14 of the 21 failed because there was some sort of scandal surrounding them. Allegations of sexual misconduct, like those against Gaetz and Hegseth, have been among the most common causes, and have also declined. the tower and Clinton’s nominee for secretary of veterans affairs Herschel Gober. But the most common genre of scandal ago Convicted candidates for the cabinetIt’s interesting, it was employment or housing one undocumented immigrant or was someone not authorized to work in the US Contemporary media cited the reason for the removal of five cabinets.
On the contrary, I only count Two candidates for the cabinet who have withdrawn in front of partisan attacksand therefore the only one they had to leave aside the concern was unqualified. Two others withdrew because senators took issue with their honest identities: John Bolton, one of George W. Bush’s nominees for ambassador to the United Nations, was dismissed for allegedly being him. difficult boss and driven by ideology rather than facts,**** while President Joe Biden’s first choice for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, was dropped because he sent too many. meaningful tweets. Another ***** or two left because of it apparent ideological differences appointed with the administration.
This could actually bode well for Trump: Unlike Gaetz and Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard and Trump’s other nominees have so far not been accused of illegal activity. Instead, senators have been lukewarm toward them Kennedy’s conspiratorial views and Gabbard’s Russian sympathies. Of course, past presidents have never appointed people with such unusual baggage to their Cabinets, so there’s no precedent for exactly how they’ll be handled. As is often the case, Trump is navigating us into uncharted waters with many of his cabinet picks, so we don’t know what will happen next.
Footnotes
* Including former MP John Ratcliffe, who He removed his appointment as Director of National Intelligence But it was in August 2019 Reappointed in February 2020 and then successfully confirmed.
**Different presidents have appointed different offices to be in the Cabinet. In addition to the Vice President and the heads of the 15 Cabinet departments, current cabinet includes chief of staff, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, director of national intelligence, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, administrator of the Small Business Administration, ambassadors. To the United Nations, the US Trade Representative, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. In order to accurately compare the number of failed appointments over time, the data in this article includes all of these offices even if they were not in Cabinet during the period in question, and does not include offices that were in Cabinet. period but not anymore.
***Including Judge Kimba Wood, news of Clinton’s attorney general nominee. On February 5, 1993, Clinton administration officials he told reporters anonymously That Clinton would nominate Wood, but the next day, he would he ran himself out because he employed an undocumented immigrant as a nanny. Since Clinton has not explicitly announced Wood’s nomination, we have omitted it from our data.
**** After stopping Bolton’s nomination, Bush he used the break date To be installed as UN ambassador. However, the Senate had to confirm it to continue working, and when that did not happen, Bolton shrugged it off.
*****We never got an official answer as to why Trump’s nominee for Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, bowed out, but we can guess: His retirement was on January 7, 2021hours after releasing a strong statement condemning the Jan. 6 riots, saying, “Any appearance of an elected official promoting violence goes against who we are as Americans.”
