Diana Furchtgott-Roth worked for the last three Republican presidents. Ronald Reagan spoke to the British-born economist of his admiration for Margaret Thatcher on the day before Furchtgott-Roth became an American citizen, and she was in the White House on 9/11.
Now she holds a new distinction. More than three years after being tapped to become assistant secretary for research and development at the Department of Transportation, she is still waiting to be confirmed by the Senate.
“That is a record,” she told the Washington Examiner. “Apparently, I’m the longest-waiting nominee.”
Confirmation delays have been a source of frustration to President Trump ever since he took office. At times, he has threatened to adjourn Congress so he could force through appointments.
Analysis by the Center for Presidential Transition last year found the process took an average of 115 days for his nominees — more than double the time needed under Reagan.
Democrats say Trump’s nominees are partisan and unqualified, while Republicans say opponents lack the numbers to vote down an official so instead are intent on wasting time and slowing important Senate business with filibusters and procedural delays.
Either way, the result is 225 nominations pending before the Senate, according to officials. Last week’s confirmation of conservative filmmaker Michael Pack to lead the agency that oversees the Voice of America reportedly took intervention by Trump. Pack had been nominated two years ago. He is under investigation by the District of Columbia attorney general for alleged financial misconduct.
Furchtgott-Roth is an extreme example of a waiting nominee. Her ethics forms posed no problem — “I have six children, so I don’t have any money” — and she appeared in October 2017 before the Senate Commerce Committee, which voted her through. But since then, she has been waiting and waiting and waiting for full Senate approval.
In the meantime, she was appointed acting assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Department of Treasury before last February becoming deputy assistant secretary for research and technology, a position that did not require confirmation.
In effect, she is doing the assistant secretary job, overseeing research facilities across the country, managing grants to more than 100 universities, and reviewing policy on everything from autonomous vehicles to drones but without the status of the title.
“I have about 1,200 people who work for me. I oversee more than a billion dollars of research in the different administrative nodes, and in order to supervise that as assistant secretary has more stature than a deputy assistant secretary,” she said.
For now, she is not taking confirmation for granted.
“I just come in every day, and I do my job,” she said. “I don’t let it affect the quality of work that I produce, and I just hope that one of these days this job, with its responsibilities, will have the title of assistant secretary that it deserves.”
Her experience includes stints at the president’s Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush, the Department of Labor, and the Hudson Institute. But as a very public advocate of low taxation (she met Reagan when she was a junior staff economist working on his 1986 tax cut) and deregulation, as well as a supporter of Trump during the 2016 campaign, her nomination faces opposition from the Left.
Larry Willis, president of the AFL-CIO labor federation’s Transportation Trades Department, spelled out the concerns recently. “Her opposition to policies important to working people, the unions that represent them, and the future of the transportation sector should disqualify her for this post,” he said.
Republicans say the use of cloture votes, which cut short filibusters but still require hours more debate, has risen, with knock-on effects to other vital Senate business.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican, said Democrats were intent on opposing Trump’s every move.
“By forcing cloture votes to further delay what should be a rather quick confirmation process prohibits the Senate from accomplishing important business like annual appropriations bills and other items that help improve the lives of Americans,” she said.
Furchtgott-Roth said she was hopeful that the logjam was easing in time for her to win confirmation. It could not be more urgent, she said, as the department works on fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, “trying to track how people are getting back on the airlines, how people are getting back on the buses, the mass transit, and as the economy opens up, how many more trips people are doing in private cars.”
More than three years since she was asked to take up the post, she has no doubt about who is to blame.
“I never would have imagined it would take so long because the Republicans had the presidency, the House, and the Senate,” she said. “But the barriers that the Democrats in the Senate put up were far above what had been put up by Republicans when they were in the minority.”
