I got the call from the National Security Council in the evening while I was out at a bar in Washington.
The staffer had an unusual question: Should Jake Sullivan, then President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, take an urgent call from a Senate-blocked State Department nominee?
It was 2021, and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was stalling every diplomatic nominee over the administration’s waiver of sanctions related to Nord Stream 2, the controversial gas pipeline with ties to Russia. Dozens of diplomatic posts sat vacant in the meantime. Yet Cruz and his staff were open to negotiation.
I was director of confirmations for Biden at the time, and this part of the negotiation fell to me. The senator had laid out his terms during a meeting with the nominee that day: He would lift his hold — but only if the official-to-be personally called Sullivan to deliver Cruz’s own arguments about why the administration was wrong on the pipeline.
The White House greenlit the call. Sullivan took it that night. The next afternoon, the hold was lifted.
The type of dealmaking it takes to fill the most important roles in public service is exhausting and often absurd, and it can leave the executive branch understaffed and unequipped for months, even years, at a time. But when it succeeds, it means another official can finally step in and get to work.
Sadly, as the events of the Senate last week show, this kind of transactional dealmaking has all but vanished — and for us to get back to fixing government and the broken state of U.S. politics in general, it needs to be revived.
“You want to know how many civilian nominees President Trump has had confirmed by unanimous consent or voice vote?” Senate Majority Leader John Thune asked when he took to the floor last week. “None. Zero. Zero percent. … This isn’t sustainable.”
He was conceding the extent of the Senate’s dysfunction — just before he and his colleagues headed home for the summer with over 100 nominees still unconfirmed.
I know how hard it is to make the confirmation process work — and how easy it is now to grind it to a halt. Before serving as director of confirmations, I worked in Senate leadership. I’ve partnered with Republicans and Democrats alike, trying to get appointments through.
These experiences taught me a hard truth. If Donald Trump and the Senate want to share responsibility for staffing this administration, each side must return to what they’ve largely abandoned: cutting a deal, even with the people who frustrate you the most.
Before the confirmation wars really heated up, candidates for lower-level positions used to cruise through with relative ease. During the George H.W. Bush administration, 93 percent of Senate votes were on legislation and less than five percent were on nominees, according to data from the Partnership for Public Service. Virtually every nominee was confirmed by unanimous consent or voice vote, streamlined procedures baked into the Senate’s byzantine rules of order. They allow appointments to advance quickly, without a roll-call vote. Crucially, they save floor time — the chamber’s most precious, and limited, resource.
But any senator could still object and delay the process, placing a hold on a nominee and extracting concessions in exchange for lifting it. While presidents never liked horse-trading over personnel, they understood the game. During the Reagan administration, Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts lifted his eight-month hold only after surgeon general nominee C. Everett Koop promised to keep his personal religious views out of public health policy. In the 1990s, Sen. Jesse Helms of South Carolina brought the entire Foreign Relations Committee to a standstill until the Bill Clinton administration relented on an up-or-down vote on his plan to reorganize the State Department. Holds were powerful — wielded strategically — but never for routine obstruction.
That balance began to unravel during the Obama years, when Republicans filibustered judicial picks to the D.C. Circuit, demanding a roll-call vote and a 60-vote threshold for confirmation. In 2013, Democrats responded by invoking the so-called “nuclear option,” eliminating the 60-vote threshold for most executive branch and judicial nominees, thus making it easier to confirm nominees with only one party’s support. In response to Democrat-orchestrated slowdowns during Trump’s first term, Republicans expanded the same rule to include Supreme Court nominees and also cut debate time for most others from 30 hours to two hours to make it easier to get their own nominees through. By the end of the first Trump administration, a majority of votes taken in the Senate, 64 percent, were nominations.
At the outset of Biden’s term, it was clear that with the slimmest of Democratic majorities, we couldn’t vote through 1,200 confirmed positions one by one. There wasn’t enough floor time, not even close. We had to reawaken Washington’s dormant dealmaking culture.
That meant negotiating, and it started at the top. Sen. Mitch McConnell didn’t support most of our agenda. But as Republican minority leader at the time, he cared deeply about protecting the Senate’s prerogatives, especially when it came to Republican-designated seats on independent boards and commissions. While that norm had already started to erode during Trump’s first term, we stuck to it. We put forward McConnell’s picks. In return, he helped move ours.
It wasn’t always popular in the West Wing. Some White House colleagues bristled at the idea of naming Republicans who weren’t aligned with Biden’s policies. But we weren’t handing out favors. We were honoring an old Senate practice to keep the confirmations moving.
With an agreement in hand, we revived the art of pairing nominees: bundling a Democrat and a Republican as a negotiated package. Tying their fates together gave both sides something to gain, helping us expedite confirmations at regulators like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Pairing was the easy part. The trickier work was getting through the individual holds that came from all corners of the Senate. Some members were repeat players. Sometimes they had real concerns. Often, they didn’t. Our job was to find out what they wanted anyway.
To lift holds, we pestered cabinet secretaries to respond to unanswered congressional letters and shook loose bureaucratic holdups for constituents in a member’s state. It didn’t require earth-shattering concessions. One time, we helped arrange a briefing that Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida wanted but an agency wouldn’t schedule until the White House intervened. Shortly after, he lifted his hold on a senior appointee for the Peace Corps.
Yet the hardest fights came from blanket holds, a sweeping tactic to stall an agency’s entire slate of nominees. At one point, then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida held all four candidates for the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, which oversees $1 trillion in retirement funds for federal employees. His demand? A commitment that no money would flow to Chinese companies, citing national security concerns. With their confirmations stalled for months, the nominees ultimately agreed. Rubio lifted his holds, quietly shaping financial markets in the process.
Other blanket holds seemed intractable. After the Sullivan call, Cruz’s broader freeze remained for nearly a year, ending only after a deal: He negotiated a vote on his own legislation to force the imposition of sanctions on entities helping the pipeline. In exchange, more than three dozen ambassadors were cleared.
Democrats weren’t above hostage-taking either. We found ourselves negotiating with them plenty, and some of the most off-the-wall demands came from our own side. One unforgettable case involved Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who held up the confirmation of a Department of Agriculture nominee to demand a briefing on a specific grievance: feral cows roaming the Gila National Forest. Eventually, the Forest Service approved a helicopter to dispatch them — by shooting from the air. The nominee was confirmed soon after.
It felt surreal. But it was also a reminder. For all its flaws, the process rested on a basic proposition: If we want our people in place, we have to bargain.
Even as we pushed the process forward, the foundation beneath it was crumbling. Across-the-board holds became more frequent, and far more intractable. First came Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, who blocked hundreds of military promotions over the Pentagon’s abortion travel policy. Then came then-Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, who froze every Justice Department nominee in retaliation for Trump’s prosecutions. “If Merrick Garland wants to use these officials to harass Joe Biden’s political opponents, we will grind his department to a halt,” Vance said in a statement at the time.
And now? The duct tape that held a fragile system together is fraying. If the Biden team relied on elbow grease to keep the gears turning, the Trump team has set the entire machine on fire.
Instead of engaging, Trump has pushed for recess appointments and demanded rule changes to jam through confirmations. He’s mocked the process outright, accusing his opponents of “political extortion” and telling Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to “GO TO HELL.” Rather than nominate Democrats, he’s fired them at the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have focused more on blaming the minority than pressing the White House to do its part.
Senate Democrats have responded by digging in: no unanimous consents, no shortcuts. They’ve placed holds of their own — over Trump’s acceptance of a luxury jet from the Qataris, his unilateral dismantling of foreign aid and picks they view as unqualified, even dangerous. As Schumer put it: “Historically bad nominees deserve historic levels of scrutiny.”
With the chamber now adjourned for the summer, the Senate still has time to find its way back. For the president, that means offering bipartisan picks and leaning on his deal-making instincts. For senators, it means confirming qualified nominees by consent even if they oppose the president’s broader agenda. Thune may be the only Republican with enough leverage to bring Trump back to the table. But Democrats will have to bargain, too — not as an act of surrender, but as a commitment to governing.
If they don’t, failure is inevitable: critical roles unfilled, a public sector that struggles to function and a Senate sidelined from its advice and consent role. If the politics don’t allow for compromise, the result will be a more majoritarian, less deliberative institution — and a weaker check not just on Trump but on every president who follows.
The question now isn’t who broke the process. It’s who still remembers how to fix it.
