Political Appointees

Every new President fills roughly 4,000 positions with people of the administration's choosing, far more than in any other wealthy democracy, where most senior posts are held by career officials. These appointees sit atop a career workforce of about two million and are meant to translate the President's agenda into action. The positions are listed every four years in a congressional publication called the Plum Book.

Appointees fall into several categories. About 1,300 are presidential appointments with Senate confirmation, including cabinet secretaries, deputy and assistant secretaries, ambassadors, U.S. Attorneys and Marshals, and members of regulatory commissions. A few hundred are presidential appointments without confirmation, mostly in the White House. The rest are noncareer members of the Senior Executive Service and Schedule C employees, who serve as confidential assistants and policy advisers to appointed officials and can be hired and fired at will.

Filling these posts is slow. Confirmation backlogs routinely leave hundreds of positions vacant or held by acting officials well into a President's term, and the Senate has repeatedly changed its rules to speed nominations. Reformers have proposed cutting the number of confirmed positions, and in 2012 Congress removed confirmation from about 160 lower-level posts. The 2025 effort to reclassify career employees in policy-influencing roles would effectively expand the number of positions a President controls, a change critics see as politicizing the bureaucracy and supporters as restoring democratic accountability.