Donald Trump’s nominations for Cabinet, White House team

Scott Gottlieb, President Trump’s choice for head of the Food and Drug Administration, was confirmed by the Senate on Tuesday in a 57 to 42 vote.

The former deputy commissioner of the FDA under George W. Bush will come to the job with strong views about what FDA reform might look like — unlike many of Trump’s other nominees.

Richard Grenell, a well-known conservative communications professional, will reportedly soon be announced as the Trump administration’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It’s an important job given the alliance’s mission of standing up to Russia — and a tough one given President Trump’s harsh criticism of the organization.

Which makes it interesting that Grenell, unlike his potential boss, is a strong supporter of maintaining the NATO alliance and using it as a counterweight to Russia’s efforts to expand its influence in Eastern Europe. Grenell, who served as a foreign policy spokesperson in the George W. Bush administration, seems more aligned with the moderate wing of the administration (represented by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis) than the radical revisionist one (represented by senior strategist Steve Bannon).

Sonny Perdue, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as agriculture secretary, has not yet been confirmed, and nobody knows why.

It’s not that Democrats are obstructing his confirmation — since changes to the Senate’s filibuster rule, they can’t block a Trump nominee unless they recruit three Republican “no” votes. And in the case of Perdue — unlike, say, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — they aren’t trying to do this. Nor are they resorting to extraordinary measures like the all-night debate that stalled Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s confirmation, or the committee walkouts that dramatized ethical issues hanging over the heads of Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin or Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

Now that Rick Perry has been confirmed as Donald Trump’s energy secretary, we’re about to find out what he really believes — and what he’s willing to fight for.

Back when he was governor of Texas and running for president in 2011, Perry famously vowed to abolish the Department of Energy (DOE) — an agency with a $32 billion budget that oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal and also funds energy research on everything from solar panels to carbon capture.

There are 549 key positions in President Donald Trump’s administration that require Senate confirmation. Trump has yet to nominate anyone to 515 of them. According to Max Stier, the CEO of the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, when it comes to political appointments, Trump is lagging behind almost every recent president — and he has a long way to go.

Of course, presidential transition is always a difficult process. There are upward of 4,000 positions that can be filled by presidential appointment, and no administration has handled this perfectly. But some transitions have been smoother than others.

David Friedman, President Trump’s pick to be the next US ambassador to Israel, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Thursday for his confirmation hearing.

It was anything but routine.

On Thursday, President Trump nominated a law school dean as the next secretary of labor after his first choice for the job went down in flames.

R. Alexander Acosta, currently the dean of Florida International University College of Law, served as assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush. Acosta is the first Hispanic person nominated to Trump’s cabinet.

On February 8, President Trump announced the appointment of Elaine Duke to serve as deputy secretary of homeland security. It was the first nomination since the blizzard of initial picks ended on February 1, and unlike many of Trump’s choices, it was a very solid one. Duke is a career civil servant who was tapped as undersecretary of homeland security for management in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration and then served for a couple of years under Obama — exactly the sort of experienced deputy someone like John Kelly will need to help him run a large agency he’s never worked in before.

And Kelly, for his part, has extensive federal government experience as a retired general. It’s the kind of experience that might lend him the wisdom and humility necessary to see that a veteran of the actual agency he is in charge of could be a useful person to have on hand.

Andrew Puzder is out. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary announced that he would be withdrawing his name from consideration, according to the Associated Press.

The withdrawal comes amid reports that several Republican senators were refusing to support Puzder, and it makes him the first Cabinet nominee in Donald Trump’s administration to go down in flames.

In late January, acting Attorney General Sally Yates delivered a startling message to the Trump administration: National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had lied to other top White House officials about his dealings with the Russian ambassador to the US and was potentially vulnerable to blackmail by the Kremlin.

Now those lies have cost Flynn his job: On Monday night, Flynn resigned amid growing questions about whether he had misled Vice President Mike Pence, and potentially the FBI, about his phone calls with the Russian envoy on December 29, the same day the Obama administration slapped new sanctions on Moscow for its interference in the 2016 presidential elections.

Rep. Tom Price, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, spent 12 years in Congress writing legislation on health care issues. And for at least the past four years, he bought and sold more than $300,000 in health care stocks — stocks whose value was affected by the legislation he was working on.

Senate Democrats hoped Price’s stock trades would derail his confirmation hearings, hammering on them in hearings. Instead, he was confirmed early Friday by a party line vote of 52 to 47.

The Senate is on track to confirm Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) as health and human services secretary late Thursday or early Friday morning.

And at a moment when congressional Republicans are struggling to figure out what comes next, the Georgia legislator and former doctor already has a plan for how to abolish Obamacare.

Vice President Mike Pence broke a Senate tie to confirm Betsy DeVos, 51-50, as the next education secretary, after a contentious process that made her Trump’s most divisive nominee.

So the thousands of Americans who called their senators begging them to vote against DeVos, in the end, aren’t going to get what they want. The Senate Democrats who stayed up all night arguing that she would be a disaster as education secretary were stymied too.

Betsy DeVos doesn’t support public schools. She didn’t attend them as a student, and she has never worked in the system. Wealthy and religious, she has no experience with financial aid or Pell Grants, student loans or special education. Her passion is to help parents find alternatives to traditional pathways through charters and vouchers. As Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) stated in her decision against DeVos, the primary duty of the secretary of education is to “strengthen our public schools,” but everything in Devos’s background makes her a poor advocate for them. Her “lack of experience” disqualifies her for the job.

That’s the argument.

Someone out there really wants President Donald Trump’s polarizing nominee for secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, to get the job — so much so that they’ve been paying random internet users to write notes supporting her contentious confirmation.

Users on paid task sites like InstaGC, Swagbucks, which reward users for shopping at certain websites or completing small tasks and surveys online, as well as ‘freemium’-based mobile fashion game Covet Fashion, have been reporting a task that links to SupportDeVos.com. The website contains a contact form to get in touch with members of Congress — but only to send notes of support for DeVos’s confirmation. Users who fill out and send the support form earn points or actual cash, but there is no option to send a note of dissent.

It used to be common for all of a president’s Cabinet nominees to reach the Senate floor and be confirmed by at least 80 yea votes out of 100. But rising polarization, along with a handful of divisive nominees, has led to large blocs of opposing senators casting nay votes on Cabinet nominations starting in the early 2000s.

And this year, we’re seeing a continuation of that polarization, with a large group of Democrats saying they’ll oppose several of President Donald Trump’s nominees. That’s nothing new. However, what is different are the scant public service résumés of Trump’s nominees, including Betsy DeVos, who was tapped to be education secretary. In fact, Democrats are holding the floor for a 24-hour talkathon to oppose DeVos’s nomination.

On Tuesday, Senate Democrats on the finance committee boycotted the votes for two of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees. Progressive groups cheered: The boycott deprived the finance committee a quorum, and temporarily prevented Republicans from sending the Trump nominees to the Senate floor to be confirmed.

But on Wednesday, Republicans deployed a workaround — Republicans on the committee used a “unanimous consent” clause to suspend all of its rules for the meeting, then voted to confirm the nominations for Steven Mnuchin, up for Treasury secretary, and Tom Price, nominated for Health and Human Services secretary.

One of Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominee has galvanized more opposition than any other: Betsy DeVos, the conservative billionaire philanthropist whom Trump has nominated to head the Department of Education.

She’s inspired hashtags, a “wear red day” revolt among teachers, and an aggressive critique from sitting Democrats. In recent days, her critics have reportedly overwhelmed phone lines urging senators to oppose her nomination when it comes up for a vote this week.

Congress member Tom Price, Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, has been under fire for trading health care stocks while writing laws that impacted the companies he was investing in. And now, according to the Wall Street Journal’s James Grimaldi, it looks like he may have doubled his trouble by not being entirely accurate in his statements to Congress during his two rounds of confirmation hearings.

What’s at issue specifically is his purchase of discounted shares in an Australian biotechnology company called Innate Immunotherapeutics. During Senate confirmation hearings, he was asked about this apparent sweetheart deal and testified that the shares “were available to every single individual that was an investor at the time.”

Paul Teller isn’t a household name, but the former chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has been picked for an important job in the Trump White House — liaison to the right wing of the House Republican Party. He has a reputation as a bit of a bomb thrower (he described himself as a “classroom agitator” to the Hill), and his vision for the Trump administration, as outlined in a post-election speech he gave to the conservative Council on National Policy, is certainly quite extreme.

The CNP made a recording of the speech, which a helpful correspondent flagged for me, and you can listen to for yourself here but the big highlights come around minutes 24 and 25.

As liberals prepare to fight back against Donald Trump and his nascent administration, they are swiftly finding reasons to be disappointed in the elected leadership of the Democratic Party.

Liberal senators like Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren are voting to confirm Ben Carson as secretary of housing and urban development, outraging grassroots progressives.

The vice presidency is a strange office, lacking practically any formal powers despite its symbolic importance and high public profile. The result is that a vice president’s influence depends largely on the whims of the president. Some veeps have been delegated important tasks and served as major strategic advisers, while others have been largely ignored and sent off to attend funerals that aren’t deemed worth the president’s time. Trump chose Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate to shore up his support in the Republican Party and the conservative movement, and so far Pence appears to have had immense sway in staffing the administration. But he’ll only keep that influence if he remains in Trump’s good graces.

Read more: 7 things to know about Mike Pence

For families with disabled children, few federal laws are as important as the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, known as IDEA. It’s the law that grants children with disabilities the right to attend public school. It also mandates that schools provide them with the services necessary to achieve success in that setting — in the same classrooms as non-disabled kids, whenever possible.

During Tuesday’s confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to run the US Department of Education, DeVos appeared to be unfamiliar with the law at the most basic level.

Senate Democrats hit Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary, on all sides at her confirmation hearing Tuesday night. But the question that made her look worst required her to demonstrate a basic understanding of education policy — a test DeVos failed.

Sen. Al Franken asked DeVos to explain her thinking on whether test scores should be used to measure students’ proficiency or their growth. That’s an important, and basic, difference because it affects how schools are labeled as succeeding or failing.

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary, said during her Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday that local authorities should decide whether guns should be barred from American schools — citing the case of a school in Wyoming where a special fence protects students from bears.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy asked Betsy DeVos to explain whether she thought guns belonged “in or around schools.”