Trump's Cabinet woes are back, earlier than ever

There's still more than a month until Inauguration Day, but President-elect Donald Trump's administration is already off to a rocky start. His first nominee for attorney general, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, had to drop out of consideration after a week amid allegations that he paid for sex with underage girls. And last week, reports surfaced that Trump may replace his nominee for secretary of defense, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, amid swirling sexual-assault allegations and other concerns about his fitness for office.

It's a throwback to the human-resources turmoil that marked Trump's previous stint in the White House. During his first four years, Trump had more failed Cabinet nominations than any president since at least Jimmy Carter — and this time around, he's already the fastest president(-elect) in decades to see a Cabinet nominee fail.

Failed Cabinet nominations are a rite of initiation for presidents: Every president since Carter has had at least one of their Cabinet appointees fail to be confirmed by the Senate. (Most, like Gaetz, withdrew rather than face a tough confirmation fight, but one — former Sen. John Tower, former President George H.W. Bush's first choice for defense secretary — was actually voted down.)

But Trump set a modern record in his first term when six* of his nominees for jobs that are currently at the Cabinet level** withdrew from consideration. Former President Bill Clinton is second with four failed nominations,*** while former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had three each. All other presidents since Carter had exactly one.

Of course, these numbers represent nominees who withdrew over the course of previous presidents' entire terms — and Trump's second term hasn't even started yet. As the chart above shows, it's normal for presidents to whiff on one Cabinet nominee at, or even before, the start of their presidency. Obama even had three: his initial pick for secretary of health and human services and his first two picks for commerce secretary. (For what it's worth, this didn't seem to have a negative impact on his presidency. Obama's average approval ratings stayed above 60 percent through May 2009, and the 2009-10 Congress was one of the most productive in history.)

But Trump is already ahead of Obama's pace. Obama's first commerce secretary nominee, then-New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, dropped out on Jan. 4, 2009. Gaetz withdrew on Nov. 21, 2024. In fact, Gaetz withdrew quicker than any other Cabinet appointee has withdrawn in the last 50 years.

And while we don't know for sure what will happen in the future, Trump appears to have a good chance to tie or break Obama's record of three failed nominees at the start of a presidency. There's plenty of time left, and plenty of controversial Cabinet appointees who could face difficult paths to confirmation, such as Hegseth, anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his nominee for secretary of health and human services, and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, his nominee for director of national intelligence.

That may seem particularly embarrassing for Trump given that his party is set to hold a 53-47 majority in the next Senate. But historically, most failed Cabinet picks actually haven't been torpedoed by the opposite party; they've withdrawn in the face of (potential) resistance from their own side. Seventeen of the 21 failed Cabinet nominations since the Carter administration have happened when the Senate was controlled by the president's party.

Instead, the vast majority of failed Cabinet nominations tanked because a scandal emerged about the nominee. It's a subjective exercise to try to boil down the failure of every past Cabinet appointment to a single reason, but by my reckoning, 14 of the 21 failed because some kind of scandal was swirling around them. Sexual misconduct allegations, like the ones dogging Gaetz and Hegseth, have been among the most common reasons, also dragging down Tower and Clinton veterans affairs secretary nominee Hershel Gober. But the most common genre of scandal that has doomed Cabinet nominees, interestingly, has been employing or housing an undocumented immigrant or someone who was not authorized to work in the U.S. Contemporary media reports cited that as the reason behind five Cabinet withdrawals.

By contrast, I count only two Cabinet nominees who have withdrawn in the face of partisan attacks, and only one who was forced to step aside because of concerns he was unqualified. Two more withdrew because senators took issue with their prickly personalities: John Bolton, one of George W. Bush's nominees for ambassador to the United Nations, was undone by accusations that he was a difficult boss and motivated by ideology over facts,**** while President Joe Biden's first choice for director of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, dropped out because she had sent too many mean tweets. One or two***** others withdrew because of apparent ideological differences with the administration that appointed them.

This may actually bode well for Trump: Unlike Gaetz and Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard and Trump's other nominees so far haven't been accused of any illegal activities. Instead, senators have appeared lukewarm on them because of Kennedy's conspiratorial views and Gabbard's Russian sympathies. Of course, past presidents have never appointed people with such unusual baggage to their Cabinets before, so there isn't exactly a precedent for how they will be handled. As is so often the case, Trump is sailing us into uncharted waters with many of his Cabinet picks, so we don't know what will happen.

Footnotes

*Including former Rep. John Ratcliffe, who withdrew his nomination for director of national intelligence in August 2019 but was renominated in February 2020 and then successfully confirmed.

**Different presidents have designated different offices to be in the Cabinet. In addition to the vice president and the heads of the 15 Cabinet departments, the current Cabinet includes the chief of staff, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the director of national intelligence, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the administrator of the Small Business Administration, the ambassador to the United Nations, the U.S. trade representative, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the director of the Office of Management and Budget. In order to fairly compare the number of failed nominations across time, the data in this article includes all of these offices even if they weren't in the Cabinet during the period in question — and doesn't include offices that were in the Cabinet at the time but aren't anymore.

***Not including Judge Kimba Wood, a reported Clinton nominee for attorney general. On Feb. 5, 1993, Clinton administration officials anonymously told reporters that Clinton would appoint Wood, but the following day, she took herself out of the running because she had employed an undocumented immigrant as a nanny. Because Clinton never explicitly announced Wood's appointment, we've excluded her from our data.

****After Bolton's nomination stalled, Bush used a recess appointment to install him as U.N. ambassador. However, he needed to get confirmed by the Senate in order to stay on in the job, and when that didn't happen, Bolton stepped aside.

*****We never got an official answer about why Trump homeland security secretary nominee Chad Wolf bowed out, but we can make a guess: His withdrawal came on Jan. 7, 2021, just hours after he issued a strongly worded statement condemning the Jan. 6 riot and saying, "Any appearance of inciting violence by an elected official goes against who we are as Americans."