GOP Senator Warns of Trump Nominee Backlog: ‘We’ll Never Get Caught Up’ 

With the U.S. Senate set to break for August recess Monday, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told The Daily Signal he is pushing for action on approximately 140 presidential nominees still awaiting confirmation. 

While the Senate has confirmed more than twice as many nominees as it had at this point in the first Trump administration, Lee said he remains concerned about the pace. The nominees include ambassadors, U.S. attorneys, assistant secretaries, and undersecretaries. 

“We’ll never get caught up,” Lee said of the current pace of confirmations. “It’ll probably be April—perhaps late April—before we’re done with this slate of roughly 150 nominees. By then, during that time, guess what’s going to happen? We’ll probably have another 200-plus nominees come out of committee between now and April.” 

The backlog, Lee told The Daily Signal, not only hampers the Trump administration’s work but also slows the Senate’s ability to consider legislative proposals.  

“When we’re on the executive calendar, we’re not legislating,” Lee said. “There are a lot of bad things that have evolved in our law, a lot of things that need to be reformed or repealed entirely. Those are all things that we can’t do when we’re stuck incessantly on the executive calendar.” 

While President Donald Trump could use recess appointments to temporarily fill the roles, those appointments would expire at the end of the Senate’s next session. Lee would prefer to skip the August recess to work on the backlog but would support Trump’s using recess appointments if the Senate proceeds with its scheduled break. 

To counter Democrat efforts to delay confirmations, Lee said persistence is “the number one tool that we have.” 

“You just have to exhaust them to the point where they no longer want to delay. Tell them we’re not leaving until all [approximately] 150 … of these people are confirmed. And then they’ll buckle down and we can start doing votes that last only 10 minutes. We’ll do them back-to-back all day long.” 

Democrat senators have defended their tactics, but in a separate interview with The Daily Signal, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., accused her colleagues of “being obstructionists.”

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