This week, while waiting around for a breakthrough on the government shutdown (a breakthrough which never happened), the U.S. Senate finished clearing a massive backlog of nominees from the Executive Calendar. 107 nominations were confirmed in one en bloc vote on October 7 – a party-line vote of 51 yeas, 47 nays.

Four of those 107 were at the U.S. Department of Transportation:

• Gregory Zerzan, General Counsel for the Department
• Michael Rutherford, Assistant Secretary for Multimodal Freight
• Derek Barrs, Administrator, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration
• David Fink, Administrator, Federal Railroad Administration

That action only left 26 civilian nominations still pending on the Executive Calendar, many of whom are federal judges whose nominations require slightly more time. None of those are at USDOT.

The Executive Calendar only shows nominees who have been reported from committee. The Trump Administration still has four USDOT nominations pending in committee.

• Pending in committee since March 10: Seval Oz, to be Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology. (Hearing held July 23 – her nomination was scheduled to be considered at an October 8 markup but that markup was postponed.)
• Pending in committee since May 6: Steven Carmel, to be Administrator of the Maritime Administration. (No hearing yet.)
• Pending in committee since July 30: Daniel Edwards, to be Assistant Secretary for Aviation and International Affairs. (No hearing yet.)
• Pending in committee since September 3: Ryan McCormack, to be Under Secretary of Transportation for Policy. (No hearing yet.)

With the latest wave of confirmations, the second Trump Administration is roughly at the same pace at getting Senate-confirmed people on board at senior USDOT roles as were Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama in their first years in office, as the following table shows. (It also shows how the second Trump Administration is following the first term in not putting a priority on naming several Assistant Secretaries.)

(The almost miraculous speed with which the Senate cleared Presidential nominees in Ronald Reagan’s first term, which was typical of previous Administrations, is probably not coming back. The Senate doesn’t work that way anymore.)

Not all delays in the process can be ascribed to the Senate. The President must first send nominations forward. And this second Trump term is much faster to get people named than was the first Trump term. And with regard to modal administrations, this Administration is much faster than was the Obama Administration.

Outside the Department, there are also multiple other Trump nominations for transportation-related boards and commissions pending in committee. But no one is certain how any of those will proceed, so long as there is uncertainty over how long those persons will be allowed to remain on those boards and commissions.

On any board or commission where the law provides different political parties (“no more than x members may be from the same political party”), there is a strong Senate tradition that such nominations move to the Senate floor in pairs, one R and one D, whenever possible, so as to preserve party balance. This tradition is as close to ironclad as these things get, and has been maintained no matter which party held the White House and which party controlled the Senate.

But that was before any President started firing Senate-confirmed board and commission members for no reason other than the way they vote. Why should Democratic Senators approve a bipartisan pairing of President Trump’s new members to a board or commission if he can simply remove the Democratic members a week or a month after the Senate confirms them?

It would not be surprising to see the Senate wait to move on as many board and commission vacancies as possible until after the U.S. Supreme Court settles the President’s removal power, one way or the other, a few months from now.