The Biden administration has 160 nominees languishing in the Senate, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which follows presidential selections.
But more than 300 positions are expecting nominees, and the slow-moving Senate has approved only 81 officials to date.
Some key positions in the Biden administration, including budget director and solicitor general, are still vacant without a Senate-confirmed official, with no appointments made to date.
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Kathryn Tenpas, a nonresident senior fellow for governance education at the Brookings Institution, said while Biden has a high number of vacancies, he has put forward nominees more quickly.
“Their ability to staff the government is limited because of the Senate’s ability to confirm nominees in a timely manner,” Tenpas told the Washington Examiner.
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Biden had tapped more officials at the 100-day mark of his presidency than his six most recent predecessors, according to the White House Transition Project.
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That speed has straightened out in more recent weeks, with his pace of appointments now dropping below the pace at which former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan chose officials.
But Biden has achieved much fewer confirmations at this point in his presidency than Obama and Bush, who both had confirmed well over 100 nominees by July of the first year of their presidencies, according to the Partnership for Public Service.
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Kristine Simmons, the vice president for government matters at the Partnership for Public Service, blamed some of the vacancies on the slower pace of confirmations occurring in the 50-50 Senate.
“Because the Senate is evenly split, there is a special process that a nominee must go through if the committee deadlocks,” Simmons told the Washington Examiner.
“It triggers an additional process on the Senate floor, and sometimes the vice president is required to come in and break a tie,” Simmons said. “So, that requires a ton of logistical work to make sure scheduling enables that.”
Appointments usually progress through committees of jurisdiction before traveling to the Senate floor for a vote. For example, diplomatic posts must first go through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Pentagon posts must first go through the Senate Armed Services Committee.
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But when the committees are evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, the committee vote can seldom result in a draw. Simmons said her organization has heard from Senate committees in the last months that lawmakers in both parties are allowing extra time for vetting and meetings to reach bipartisan support so the committees don’t end up deadlocking.
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