The word “acting” often comes up in connection with the administration of President Donald Trump — as in Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney or Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin K. McAleenan. There has been a considerable amount of turnover in the Trump Administration, which has been so chaotic that veteran journalist Bob Woodward even named his most recent book, “Chaos: Trump in the White House.” And the heavy volume of vacancies in the U.S. federal government is the subject of a report by Dareh Gregorian for NBC News.
Gregorian reports that presently, there are “138 nominees awaiting confirmation by the Senate” and “132 positions that have no nominee at all.” And according to Max Stier, president of Partnership for Public Service (a nonprofit that tracks presidential appointments), “what we have seen is unprecedented, with consistent vacancies across the government.”
Trump’s nominees, Gregorian observes, have been “averaging 105 days between nomination and confirmation” — whereas “the average time for President Barack Obama’s nominations to clear was 93 days.”
View the complete May 15 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.