If Trump loses a vote, it will only be because some of his nominees are uniquely bad. The Senate has not been dragging its feet.

To listen to Donald Trump and his media partisans since the election, the Senate is so hostile and dilatory in dealing with Trump’s senior executive branch nominations that it was urgent to force the Senate into recess in order to staff his administration. Yet, as January comes to a close, there have been eight cabinet or cabinet-level nominees confirmed so far: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. Two nominations (Chris Wright for secretary of energy and Doug Collins for secretary of veterans affairs) cleared cloture votes yesterday and could be confirmed as soon as today. Four nominations (Pam Bondi for attorney general, Scott Turner for secretary of housing and urban development, Russell Vought for OMB director, and Elise Stefanik for U.N. ambassador) have been voted out of committee. A cloture vote on Bondi’s nomination is expected for Monday, and committee votes on Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary and Kelly Loeffler for SBA administrator have been scheduled for Wednesday. Hearings have been held for Brooke Rollins for secretary of agriculture, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for HHS secretary, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Jamieson Greer for U.S. trade representative. Only two cabinet nominees (Lori Chavez-DeRemer for labor secretary and Linda McMahon for secretary of education) have yet to have hearings. One nominee (Matt Gaetz for attorney general) was withdrawn; none has yet been voted down, although Hegseth squeaked through with a tiebreaking vote cast by JD Vance, and it remains to be seen if RFK Jr. and Gabbard have the votes (one can only hope that the Senate might find the will to reject Chavez-DeRemer, but it’s likely that she has too much Democratic support to be stopped).

This is hardly a dilatory schedule. It’s a little hard to compare figures from past cabinets because what counts as a cabinet job tends to change in the counting, but if we look at Senate records (such as for Joe Biden), we can compare this to past nomination timelines dating back to Bill Clinton’s presidency:

Now, the Senate lists only formal cabinet posts for past presidencies, but even if that counts out Ratcliffe and Zeldin, it’s possible that we still end with eight confirmations by the end of January if Wright and Collins are confirmed today. As you can see from the chart, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush got nearly their whole cabinets staffed by the end of January, with Clinton held up by taking three tries to pick an attorney general who could survive Senate confirmation. While no nominee has been voted down since John Tower in 1989, each administration other than Biden’s has had at least one failed nomination for the initial cabinet: Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood for attorney general under Clinton, Linda Chavez for labor secretary under George W. Bush, Tom Daschle for HHS and Judd Gregg and Bill Richardson for commerce secretary under Barack Obama, and Andrew Puzder for labor secretary in Trump’s first term. A few nominees only squeaked in: Betsy DeVos was confirmed by Mike Pence casting a tiebreaking vote, and Xavier Becerra by a 50-49 vote.

Trump has a fairer complaint that the process slowed down in his first term; while Obama was slower than his predecessors to get his cabinet through, the really dramatic slowdown happened in 2017. That’s ironic, given that that’s the point at which the Senate minority could no longer filibuster executive-branch appointments, and it’s partly the fault of Trump not sending up nominations as quickly as his predecessors. This time around, however, things have proceeded with dispatch. If Trump loses a vote, it will only be because some of his nominees are uniquely bad. The Senate has not been dragging its feet.