What is the Presidential Appointments Process? – Executive Branch for America

One occurs between the election and inauguration of the new President and may spill over into the post-inauguration period. That phase is often marked by ambiguity, overlap, and duplication of responsibilities, with great uncertainty about procedures for recruiting, vetting, selecting, and approving nominees. It’s a learning period for a new administration. Order is hard to impose before a President has taken office, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the vortex of activity surrounding the personnel selection process. On the one hand, the President-elect’s aides are scouring the country for just the right people to serve in the new administration. But, on the other, they’re fielding tens of thousands of unsolicited resumes and coping with hordes of aggressive job-seekers.

During the pre-inauguration period, most Presidents-elect try to choose the members of the Cabinet and perhaps a few other nominees for prominent positions like an ambassador to the U.N. or head of the Environmental Protection Agency. This is the most personalized and ad hoc phase of the personnel selection process, where the President is usually deeply involved and many of the people selected for high-level positions are well-known to him.

But what happens before the inauguration bears little resemblance to what follows. Then the President’s attention is pulled elsewhere and the routines set in.

The second phase of staffing a new administration—the post-inauguration phase—begins to take on a life of its own as the President’s personal involvement begins to diminish. An important reason for the change is the scope of the task. The President simply can not commit much time to the selection of thousands of people who will fill positions in the new administration.

At this stage, many times the Agency are involved in filling Presidential appointment positions in coordination with the Presidential Personnel Office.

Presidential Appointments By the Numbers

What kinds of positions are these? Where are they located? How many are there? And has this number been consistent over time?

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Let’s start with the kinds of positions that presidents fill by appointment. The principle categories are:

Positions Subject to Presidential Appointment with Senate Confirmation. These are often called PAS positions and include most of the highest-ranking positions in the Cabinet departments and independent agencies, members of regulatory commissions, ambassadors, U.S. attorneys and U.S. marshals.

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Positions Subject to Presidential Appointment without Senate Confirmation. These are often called PA positions. They include many members of the White House staff.

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Senior Executive Service General Positions Filled by Noncareer Appointment. Under the law, 10 percent of the positions in the Senior Executive Service are set aside for appointment by the President. (The other 90 percent are covered by the civil service.) These appointments do not require Senate confirmation.

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Schedule C Excepted Appointment. These positions, usually called Schedule Cs, are confidential or policy-determining positions ranging from executive assistants to senior officials and advisors in the Executive Branch. Schedule C appointments do not require Senate confirmation.

Selection of nominees after inauguration.

The first stage in the process is the selection of an individual to fill a position in the executive branch. After successfully navigating this part of the process, the person will become the President’s nominee for the position.

With few exceptions, the initial screening of potential nominees is done by the Office of Presidential Personnel (OPP) in the White House. OPP identifies positions to be filled, prepares job descriptions and other relevant information about the position, and oversees the collection of names of candidates.

Names from these sources are reviewed, and the list is shortened to a few for internal discussion. From those discussions, one name usually emerges as the top candidate. OPP then conducts a vetting process that includes checking references and verifying resume items. The candidate then runs through a series of political clearances that may vary slightly from position to position, but generally include White House officials, the Cabinet secretary, state, and local party leaders, relevant interest groups, and members of Congress most likely to be interested in the position.

If the vetting is successful, the candidate is subjected to further background checks by OPP staff, focusing principally on whether there is anything in the candidate’s background that may prove to be damaging to the nomination or embarrassing to the President.

Clearance

The management of the process now shifts to the Office of the Counsel to the President. The Counsel’s office oversees a variety of formal clearances to ensure that candidates for appointments are free of legal or ethical entanglements or personal flaws that might undermine their nominations.

The first step in the clearance process is the completion of what to many candidates seems a daunting array of forms and questionnaires. At a minimum these include:

Acknowledgment and consent regarding intent to nominate or appoint
White House Personal Data Statement Questionnaire
SF-278: Executive Branch Personnel Public Financial Disclosure Report SF-86: Questionnaire for National Security Positions
Supplement to SF-86
Consent to have FBI conduct an investigation
Waiver for IRS to conduct tax check
Disclosure and Authorization Pertaining consumer Reports Pursuant to the Fair Credit Reporting Act
Fingerprint Approval Form

The information in these forms then becomes the basis for subsequent discussions to ensure that nominees meet all the legal and informal standards for Presidential appointees.

The other principal element of the clearance
process is the FBI full-field background investigation.

Once the clearance process has been completed, and no evidence has emerged to prevent the nomination from going forward, the White House Press Office makes a public announcement of the President’s intent to nominate the candidate.

Senate confirmation

The formal nomination triggers the Senate confirmation process for those positions that require a Senate Confirmation. In the Senate, the process is dominated by the committee that has jurisdiction over the nomination. Committees vary in their confirmation processes and in the nature of the additional forms and questionnaires they impose on nominees. But, in every case, a nominee will have to provide more information, much of it duplicating what was already provided in the White House vetting process.

Shortly after the formal nomination, the nominee will seek to make an appointment for informal conversations with the committee chair and often with other committee members as well. Typically, the Office of Presidential Personnel is out of the the picture at this point and the confirmation is overseen by the department or agency in which the the nominee will serve.

The committee staff reviews the materials from the clearance process and puts together its own file on the nomination. Unless problems are detected, the completion of this activity usually leads to the scheduling of a confirmation hearing. If the staff finds reason for concern in its own analysis of the nominee, this may result in more interviews with the nominee, further investigation or a request for more information from the White House. Any of these can slow the confirmation of the nominee.

Until 1929, nearly all confirmation hearings were held in executive session and, until World War II, nominees rarely appeared at their confirmation hearings. Confirmation hearings today are always held in public unless there is a matter that requires discussion in executive session—and that is very rare. Most hearings are friendly affairs, conversational in tone. They usually last no more than an hour. A few are more controversial and confrontational, carrying on for days and attracting significant coverage from the news media. These are the exception to the norm, but because of their visibility, they’ve come to define confirmation hearings in the public mind. This definition—the confirmation hearing as a horror show—gives pause to some candidates when they consider an appointment that has been offered to them by a President.

After the hearing

After the hearing, the committee votes on the
nomination and reports it out. A floor vote follows when it fits the Senate schedule. Many such votes are completed by unanimous consent.
The number of recorded roll-call votes on nominations is relatively small. After approval by the full Senate, the appointee receives a commission and is sworn into office.

One potential wrench in the confirmation process is the practice known as a Senate “hold.” Any member of the Senate may place a hold on a nomination at any time by informing the Majority Leader of his or her desire to do so.

Senators need not indicate the reasons for their holds, nor until recently was the existence of ahold even public information. In its traditional deference to individual members, the full Senate delays action on a nomination until the hold is lifted by the Senator who placed it. There have been times in recent years when several dozen holds were in place at one time. Senators now often use this device, not because of qualms about the fitness of the nominee placed on hold, but to hold the nomination hostage as part of an effort to get some agreement from the Administration on some matter unrelated to the nomination.

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