Trump Is Naming DOT Modal Administrators at Fastest Pace Since Reagan
In his second term, President Trump is nominating modal administrators for the U.S. Department of Transportation at a faster pace than his recent predecessors, or in his first term. However, the pace of naming senior officials within the Office of ehe Secretary is falling behind.
We exempt the Federal Aviation Administration from the comparisons, because the FAA Administrator is supposed to have a fixed five-year term and thus not all Presidents have an opening to fill in their first term in office.
Aside from FAA, this time President Trump had three of the modal administrators nominated within two weeks of his inauguration, and the last of them nominated on the 63rd day after inauguration. That compares with Joe Biden sending up his last main modal administrator 274 days into his first year in office and went four full years without ever nominating anyone to run PHMSA.
In Trump’s first term, he did not nominate anyone to run FTA or NHTSA in his first year (one was February 2018, the other April 2018) and took 234 days to nominate anyone for PHMSA. And President Obama took 332 days to nominate a MARAD Administrator.
| How Many Days After Their Inauguration Did Each President Transmit These USDOT Nominations to the Senate? | ||||
| Obama | Trump I | Biden | Trump II | |
| Secretary | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Deputy Secretary | 98 | 48 | 24 | 2 |
| Under Secretary for Transpo. Policy | 56 | 116 | 97 | |
| General Counsel | 91 | 137 | 272 | |
| Asst. Sec. for Policy | 140 | 1,053 | 92 | |
| Asst. Sec. for Budget/CFO | 171 | 832 | 82 | |
| Asst. Sec. for Govt. Aff. | 50 | 110 | 82 | |
| Asst. Sec. for Aviation/Int’l | 169 | 929 | 97 | |
| Asst. Sec. for R & T | n/a | 255 | 97 | 49 |
| FHWA Administrator | 94 | 224 | 547 | 49 |
| FTA Administrator | 100 | 391 | 82 | 14 |
| FRA Administrator | 66 | 172 | 97 | 0 |
| NHTSA Administrator | 319 | 447 | 274 | 22 |
| FMCSA Administrator | 178 | 251 | 85 | 63 |
| MARAD Administrator | 332 | 157 | 274 | 63 |
| PHMSA Administrator | 239 | 234 | no nom. | 14 |
(Mar. 31 Note: Had to correct the table because, in the first Trump Administration, which started on January 20, 2017, some nominations weren’t made until 2018 or even 2019, and thus weren’t recorded on the parent table from which the above data was taken.)
However, Trump is falling behind on the senior OST roles. In the last Administration, they named an Under Secretary for Policy quickly but were then slow to nominate the Assistant Secretaries that report to the Under Secretary, failing to do so entirely in two cases (supposedly as a cost-cutting exercise).
Simply nominating someone is not the same as getting the Senate to confirm them. The following table goes back to Ronald Reagan and shows the dates on which major DOT nominees were nominated and then confirmed. (2/5 means February 5, for example, and the year is always the year of the President’s first term of office, except that Trump’s second term is being treated separately because it is not consecutive.
