This week, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee approved the Trump Administration’s two nominees for senior positions in federal railroad policy, forwarding their names to the full Senate. Meanwhile, in a news release that we missed two weeks ago, the White House withdrew and replaced its nominee to run the Maritime Administration.

On May 12, the Senate panel approved the nomination of David Fink to be Administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration by a party-line vote of 15 to 13. The committee then approved the nomination of Robert Gleason to fill the last vacant seat on the Amtrak Board of Directors by a vote of 16 to 12 (all Republicans and Gleason’s home-state Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) in favor, all other Democrats against).

Fink now becomes Calendar Number 158 on the Senate Executive Calendar and Fink No. 461, alongside Marcus Molinaro, Federal Transit Administration (Cal. No. 63) – pending since April 3.

Sadly, the Trump Administration’s pace for naming senior officials to positions at the Department of Transportation, which started out faster than Trump’s recent predecessors, has slowed a good bit since March. It has now been 123 days since President Trump resumed office:

President Trump originally nominated Heritage Foundation scholar and naval defense expert Brent Sadler as Maritime Administrator on March 24. But on May 6, the White House unexpectedly withdrew Sadler as the nominee and replaced him with longtime Maersk executive and U.S. Merchant Marine Academy graduate Stephen Carmel.

Carmel is currently the president of U.S. Marine Management in Norfolk, VA. He was a former member of the Academy’s Board of Visitors and according to his biography there, he “began his career sailing as a deck officer and Master primarily on tankers for Maritime Overseas Corporation and Military Sealift Command. His first command was a 40,000 ton clean product tanker, which he attained at age 26.”