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WASHINGTON (TNND) — Close to a 100 of President Donald Trump’s lower-level nominees were confirmed by the Senate on Thursday, bringing the total tally of confirmed appointees to 417 in Trump’s first year of his second term.
By a 53-43 vote, Senate Republicans approved 97 appointees in its third round of bloc voting, leaving just 15 nominations left awaiting confirmation.
After facing strong objections from Senate Democrats in approving many of Trump’s lower-level nominees — creating a backlog of 150 nominees — Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) decided to implement the “nuclear option” to fast-track Trump’s nominees in September.
Through the nuclear option, Thune lowered the voting threshold required to pass lower-level nominees to a simple majority and made it possible to vote for the nominations in batches. The rule change only applied to nominations which were only subjected to two hours of debate time.
“Every president needs to have his team in place to do the job that the American people elected him to do,” Thune said ahead of Thursday’s vote.
Notable nominees that were confirmed by the Senate on Thursday include former Rep. Anthony D’Esposito as inspector general at the Department of Labor and Tammy Bruce, the ex-State Department spokesperson who was tapped to be the deputy representative to the United Nations.
After going nuclear, The Senate passed its first batch of 47 nominees which included Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump’s pick for the United States ambassador to Greece and Callista Gingrich, wife of former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who Trump picked to be as the ambassador to both Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
“We began the year by confirming President Trump’s Cabinet faster than any Senate in modern history,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-WY) told Fox News Digital. “And by week’s end, President Trump will have 417 nominees confirmed by the Senate this year. That’s far more than the 365 that Joe Biden had in his first year in office.”
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