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The second Donald Trump administration will start with fewer key staff in place than when Trump entered the White House for the first time eight years ago, with just a quarter of the political appointments made and ready to go when he is sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday.
The Independent has learned that only 1,000 people have been hired to fill a fraction of the 4,000 important presidentially appointed roles atop the federal bureaucracy, many of which can be put in place without the need of Senate confirmation. That’s roughly 300 fewer than the number of appointees hired during Trump’s chaotic 2016-2017 transition effort.
This means a large number of people expecting to get a place in the new administration are still waiting for the call to find out where they might be assigned as the transition preparation descends into chaos.
A number of factors are believed to have resulted in holding up appointments, including a combination of arguments over senior positions in Trump’s cabinet, people being offered jobs they did not want and issues of federal pay compared to higher wages in the private sector.
However, it’s not unusual for some incoming administrations to have trouble filling political appointee roles. The Biden administration only had 1,136 political appointee roles filled and staffed on January 20, but Biden administration officials attributed that slow pace to Trump’s refusal to allow his administration to interface with the 2020-2021 transition efforts stood up by the winning Biden campaign.
Trump began rolling out picks for his most important cabinet-level roles not long after he won last year’s presidential election, and his transition has boasted of the speed at which he selected his cabinet, despite a brief hiccup caused by the withdrawal of his initial pick for attorney general, the scandal-plagued former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz.
Gaetz withdrew after Trump nominated him for the role of attorney general as issues about his private life surfaced, but the president-elect swiftly replaced him with ex-Florida attorney general Pam Bondi.
There have been serious questions over the nominations of Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard to a senior security role among others, and none of Trump’s cabinet picks will be in place when he is sworn in tomorrow.
But threats of nominations being blocked are not the only reason that the process has slowed down to a crawl.
While the president-elect has also made ample use of his Truth Social platform to announce a number of less high-profile picks for what are known as “sub-cabinet” roles, most of the jobs that will be held by people who will do the day-to-day work of supervising federal civil servants have gone unfilled.
One person high up in the Trump team who is still waiting for a job described themselves as “relaxed” as they waited for whatever role they end up with but noted “it may take a while”.
Another who was involved in the controverisal Project 2025 plan, led by the Heritage Foundation, has been asked to fill three different roles on foreign relations but has refused because of the paltry remuneration on offer.
They noted that they would have to reduce their take home salary by 40 percent.
“It’s nice to be asked but public sector pay sucks,” the individual said.
Yet another close to the president-elect’s inner circle told The Independent: “I was offered a role but it was not right for me so they are going to come back with something more appropriate.”
Even roles in key areas relating to national security have gone unfilled during the transition process despite Trump’s swift selection of Florida congressman Mike Waltz as his national security adviser and Senator Marco Rubio as his Secretary of State pick.
Walz has vowed that the new administration’s national security council will be staffed only with people fully supportive of Trump’s agenda.
But one GOP foreign policy expert who spoke to The Independent said the hiring under Waltz and Rubio has moved at a snail’s pace because only people within “a certain DC foreign policy clique” have managed to land offers.
The staffing woes faced by the incoming administration stand in stark contrast to the bravado of Trump’s allies over the last four years as they worked to build what they described as a juggernaut of personnel work in the form of a massive database of potential staffers.
The database, part of the Heritage Foundation’s now-infamous Project 2025, was supposed to be a way for the incoming president to have a slate of people he could quickly appoint.
But a source familiar with the transition’s efforts says the Project 2025 database and others like it have been largely ignored by Trump’s incoming personnel chief, Sergio Gor, a former Fox News low-level producer turned publishing executive.
Trump’s decision to forgo any cooperation with the outgoing Biden administration for weeks after winning the election, including on signing memorandums of understanding to authorize background checks for incoming personnel by the FBI, has also contributed to the hiring woes.
Multiple Trump transition spokespeople declined to provide comment to The Independent when asked to weigh in on how many staffers would be in place when Trump is sworn in.
