Senators have advanced President Joe Biden’s judicial nominees at a rapid pace, but the administration still lags behind its predecessors in filling vacancies throughout the executive branch at the 200-day mark of Biden’s presidency.
The White House unveiled its sixth slate of judicial nominees on Thursday and has already gotten nine nominees confirmed to the bench, according to the American Constitution Society, which tracks appointments and vacancies in the federal judiciary.
That pace puts Biden ahead of previous presidents, who dating back to Ronald Reagan took longer to nominate as many judges in their first year, according to the Brookings Institution.
BIDEN ADMINISTRATION STILL HAS HUNDREDS OF VACANCIES COMPARABLE TO TRUMP
Appointing federal judges became a top legislative priority of the Trump administration, particularly after Republicans lost control of the House but retained the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell helped shepherd more than 220 judicial nominees to the federal bench, placing former President Donald Trump behind his two-term predecessors but giving him an enormous amount of influence over the nation’s highest courts.
For example, Trump appointed 54 judges to highly influential appeals courts while former President Barack Obama, in double the time, appointed 55, according to the Pew Research Center.
But Biden has lagged behind former presidents in getting his other nominees over the finish line and into their Senate-confirmed positions.
At this point in prior presidencies, for example, 293 of Obama’s nominees were confirmed and 283 of George W. Bush’s were confirmed. Just 115 of Biden’s nominees have made it all the way through the process, according to the Partnership for Public Service.
Trump, who faced criticism for putting forward so few nominees in the early months of his presidency, had 116 confirmations at this point in his first year.
Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, said there are far fewer vacancies in the judiciary than in the administration, making progress easier to achieve in the context of judicial nominations than in the executive branch.
“Just the size of the task is dramatically different,” Stier said.
“In the last administration and this administration, certainly, increased attention was paid to judicial nominees,” he added. “But the lift involved is not anywhere close to what exists on the executive branch side.”
Stier noted that Biden is not lagging behind in putting forward names to fill the hundreds of positions throughout the government that require Senate confirmation. Indeed, Biden has made 331 nominations in the first 200 days of his presidency, according to the Partnership for Public Service.
But the pace of confirmations has not kept up, with roughly half of the nominees still languishing at various stages of the process.
“The numbers speak for themselves, and he is, you know, relatively in the ballpark of prior precedent with respect to nominations but substantially behind when you come to the actual confirmations,” Stier said.
“I think a lot of it has to do with the competing demands of the Senate calendar,” he said. “So some of it is like, you’ve got a massive legislative demand that is sucking up a lot of time of the institution, and they just have very little to give.”
The federal government has more than 1,200 Senate-confirmed positions — a number that has ballooned since the 1960s, when there were only 779, according to the Partnership for Public Service.
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In a report released Monday, the organization argued in favor of cutting down the number of jobs that require nominees to endure a lengthy and complicated confirmation process, which can take months and depends on the whims of an increasingly divided Senate.
Biden has several high-profile openings in his administration for which he has not yet selected a nominee. Since withdrawing the nomination of Neera Tanden as his budget director, for example, Biden has not nominated anyone to lead the Office of Management and Budget, a key agency that coordinates regulations and budgets.
