How presidential appointees get confirmed

The answer

Senate confirmation looks, on paper, like a formality: the president nominates, the Senate votes yes or no.¹ What actually determines whether and how fast someone gets confirmed is a set of informal levers not written into the Constitution at all, chiefly the "hold," where a single senator can quietly block a nominee from getting a floor vote by withholding unanimous consent, forcing leadership to burn scarce floor time on a formal roll call instead.² The folk-model-breaking fact: confirmation delays have been getting steadily longer across administrations of both parties, and by 2025 Trump's second-term Cabinet nominees averaged 157 days to confirmation, more than double his own first-term average of 78 days and roughly four times Obama's and Biden's averages measured the same way.³

How it actually works

The president nominates someone to an executive-branch or judicial post requiring confirmation.¹ The relevant Senate committee holds hearings, investigates qualifications and conflicts of interest, and votes whether to report the nomination favorably to the full Senate. Historically, once out of committee, most nominees were confirmed by unanimous consent or voice vote with no real debate. That norm has eroded: any single senator can now place an anonymous or named hold, and even absent a hold, a senator can require a full cloture vote and fixed debate time before final passage, consuming floor time leadership would rather spend elsewhere.²

This is how backlogs form even for uncontroversial nominees. By late 2025, roughly 450 nominations had been sent to the Senate in Trump's first 300 days, in line with the historical average since Reagan, but a backlog of about 150 nominees accumulated because each one, even unopposed, still required individual floor time under the old rules.³ In September 2025, the Senate majority changed its own rules to allow bundling: multiple sub-Cabinet nominees can now be confirmed in a single up-or-down vote, and the chamber used this to confirm dozens at once, in one instance 48 nominees in a single vote.⁴ Cabinet-level posts were excluded from bundling and still went through the traditional one-at-a-time process, which is part of why the top-level 157-day average remained so much longer than prior administrations.³

Who holds the power

The Senate as an institution holds the confirmation vote, but individual senators, through holds and the threat of forcing cloture votes, hold outsized leverage over timing regardless of party control, since a hold does not require majority support to be effective, only the will of one member to withhold unanimous consent.

The 2025 bundling rule change affects only lower-level executive nominees. The slowdown at the Cabinet level, where individual floor time is still required, has proven durable across the aisle, meaning both parties have found holds and delay tactics useful when in the minority.

Where you come in

The Senate's Executive Calendar and Congress.gov both publish real-time nomination status, including which committee a nominee sits in and how long they have been pending, making it possible to see exactly where a stalled nomination is stuck and which senator's office to contact about a specific hold. See how to contact your member of Congress for reaching that office directly.

Related

• Hold senate
• Advice and consent
• How to contact your member of Congress

Sources

1. U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2 (Appointments Clause), 1789. source ↩ ↩²

2. Congressional Research Service, "Senate Consideration of Presidential Nominations: Committee and Floor Procedure," RL31980, 2025. source ↩ ↩²

3. Brookings Institution, "Momentum lost: Taking stock of Trump's nominations at the 300-day mark," 2025. source ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. PBS News, "Senate confirms 48 Trump nominees at once after GOP changed the chamber's rules," 2025. source ↩