Filling the four thousand positions a new president is authorized to fill is a daunting task even for the best prepared candidates. Donald Trump said he did not expect to win and thus it was no surprise that he did not have an operation under way to identify the best talent along with places for those loyalists who had helped him become president.
But even a year after the election, the Trump administration has left many jobs vacant. Trump has the slowest rate of appointments of any modern president. And as time passes he is not catching up with those who came before him, but falling further behind.
By the time Congress took its regular August recess, Trump had not even nominated people for 368 of 591 key positions requiring Senate confirmation. Paul C. Light, a New York University professor who studies the federal workforce, said that "Trump is running at a subglacial speed." He had just 124 nominees confirmed, less than half the number for Presidents Bill Clinton (252), George W. Bush (294), and Barack Obama (310). The Partnership for Public Service, which tracks presidential appointments, noted that there was not a single case in which the White House had announced an appointment but not yet formally filed the nomination, so the appointments pipeline was empty, too.
David Cay Johnston "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America" 2017
