Senate Republicans Advance Massive Trump Nominee Package
Senate Republicans cleared a major procedural milestone on Wednesday as they pushed forward nearly 100 of President Donald J. Trump’s nominees, accelerating the administration’s effort to rebuild federal agencies after years of bureaucratic stagnation. The move sets up a decisive vote on 97 of the President’s selections and marks the third time the GOP has advanced a major slate of nominees since reforming Senate confirmation procedures in September.
According to Fox News, the final confirmation vote on this package is expected next week.
If the Senate follows through, Republicans will have confirmed more than 400 of President Trump’s nominees within the first year of his second term — a blistering pace that far outstrips former President Joe Biden’s early administration, which saw only 350 confirmations at the same point.
The current group of nominees reflects President Trump’s broad reshaping of the federal workforce. Among them are former New York Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, nominated to serve as inspector general at the Department of Labor, as well as National Labor Relations Board picks James Murphy and Scott Mayer. These nominees span nearly every federal agency.
Murphy and Mayer were added to the package shortly after President Trump removed former NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox — a lawful dismissal that was later upheld by the Supreme Court.
This latest advancement came only after Senate Republicans overcame another stall tactic from Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, whose objection last week aimed to delay the process yet again.
The GOP’s decision to reform confirmation rules was prompted by Democrats’ months-long blockade of Trump nominees. Under the updated process, sub–Cabinet-level appointments can now be confirmed with a simple majority, preventing the minority party from weaponizing procedural hurdles.
One original nominee, former Fox News contributor Sara Carter — legally known as Sara Bailey — triggered complications. Designated a “Level 1” nominee for her selection as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, her presence in the slate would have forced Republicans to secure 60 votes to advance the entire group. That was virtually impossible given Democrats’ entrenched opposition and their repeated claims that several of Trump’s nominees were unqualified.
To avoid procedural sabotage, Republicans restructured the package, expanding it by nine additional nominees and moving it forward under the streamlined rules.
Meanwhile, the Senate earlier this month approved two federal prosecutors from North Carolina to serve as trial judges on the federal bench. David Bragdon was confirmed 53–45 to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, while Lindsey Ann Freeman was confirmed 60–39 to the same court. Their confirmations raise the number of judges appointed by President Trump in his second term to 21.
President Trump had already reshaped the judiciary during his first term, appointing 234 federal judges and cementing a long-lasting constitutionalist influence on the courts.
Bragdon, formerly the appellate chief at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina, received national attention after Trump announced his nomination on social media and praised Bragdon’s prior clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Bragdon recounted to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the President personally congratulated him and said “that Justice Thomas spoke highly of me.”
Progressive activists fiercely opposed Bragdon, reviving a decades-old Geocities website he created as a college student between 1997 and 2000. The archived posts expressed his early political views, including that abortion is “wrong because person or not, a fetus has just as much right to life as an infant does,” that “there is enough of a logical link between the death penalty and deterrence to call for an increased use of the death penalty,” and that “our welfare system should be a safety net and not a hammock.”
Left-wing advocacy organization Alliance for Justice warned that confirming Bragdon “would legitimize his extreme rhetoric and pave the way for dangerous shifts in the rule of law.” Their opposition largely reflects the ongoing progressive resistance to President Trump’s remaking of the federal judiciary.