Eric White: So where do things currently stand? I guess let’s just get right into it. What is the Trump administration? How is it stacking up as compared to the previous Trump administration and the Biden and Obama administrations?

Katie Dunn Tenpas: Well, it’s interesting. I’m looking at it three different ways. I’m working at the pace of confirmations. I’m also looking at the gender breakdown and the ethnic breakdown. Part of this whole project started before and during the Biden campaign in 2020, when he pledged to sort of create the most diverse cabinet possible. Some of us at Brookings thought, oh, well, let’s see if that happens. So we went back to George W. Bush and got the data of the first set of confirmation at the 100, 200 and 300 day point. And then we compared President Biden at those different points in his first term, first year in office. And as you might imagine, the diversity was in fact record setting. In this case, President Trump is faster on the pace of confirmation. So in his first term at this point, he only had 19 individuals confirmed. And, as of last Tuesday, there were 45 individuals confirmed, so there’s a huge uptick in the confirmation pace. I attribute it to two things. Is the lessons that they learned in the first term. I think the second presidential, the second Trump administration was also more professionalized in the sense that they realized the mistakes they made the first go around. And Project 2025 and the America First Policy Institute were two organizations that were dedicated to helping him get a second term. And so they were prepared. The other thing is the margin in the Senate. There are 53 Republicans and that’s a big margin to have to get your nominees through. Of these 45 nominees, only one had to be subjected to Vice President Vance’s intervention in casting the vote for Defense Secretary Hegseth.

Eric White: Yeah, you can definitely tell they’ve learned from their mistakes of the first one, pulling out nominees before they even submit them to Congress, i.e. Matt Gaetz and Stefanik. You know, how does that factor in? I mean, does that mean that you think he’s listening to those advisors more closely now, instead of just trying to force his will and ride his popularity like he did last time?

Katie Dunn Tenpas: Yeah, I think he’s realized that if he listens to Susie Wiles and maybe Stephen Miller and some of those people more carefully, that he’ll be more effective. There’s no question that the chaos that was created in the first term with staff turnover and with a lot of picks that ended up having to be pulled and yanked at the last minute, that that sort of was a learning curve. He was willing to kind of, having figured it out, that’s not the best way to govern. You learn from your mistakes and you move on. The other thing I’ll say about his 45 picks is that this is the highest proportion of non-white. Individuals, I’m sorry, the lowest proportion. So if you look at the breakdown, 84% of the individuals are white and 16% are non-white. And that’s the lowest for non-whites going back to George W. Bush, which is when our data set begins. And if you looked at women, you see the same thing. There are 84% men and 16 percent women. And I think his whole press to end DEI programs across the government and then even the private sector It is reflected in these picks as well. So there is some consistency in his public philosophy and approach to government and his push for ending those programs. And it shows in his first set of confirmed nominees.

Eric White: You know, the term DEI, it’s not a very old one. It came through during the pandemic and the George Floyd riots and all of that. Was this something that people were actually looking at beforehand because I can’t remember, I guess people kind of just phased over it in the past, in the beginning of the 2000s. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but I never heard much about. Actually looking at the diversity of leadership on a White House cabinet.

Katie Dunn Tenpas: Yeah, well, that’s interesting. It actually did go back to President Clinton. He’s the first one in my memory who really sort of said something to the extent of I want to create a cabinet that looks like America. And so his cabinet was, in fact, more diverse than his predecessors. And, you know, not all presidents do it, particularly Republicans. George Bush was not was not out there claiming that he had the most diverse. But I think over time, what you find is that more women, more non whites have gotten access to higher education, which has then in turn enabled them to get higher access to more prestigious jobs. And so it is kind of the natural trend to see more of those individuals in the highest levels, not just of government, but also in the private sector.

Eric White: And also, I wanted to find out from you going forward, are you all going to take this deeper and look at some of the other political appointees that may not be at the higher end of the cabinet postings, the more famous faces, the lower down levels? What can you tell me about what you saw from that?

Katie Dunn Tenpas: Yeah, interestingly, I don’t have a data set that’s that large. And I will tell you, it’s often very difficult to find out information about ethnicity. Sometimes it requires a few phone calls and other ways of getting at that. You know, there are many people who will say, I’m neither black nor white. I am black and white. And so in some cases in our ethnicity, we actually some kind of would count people double if that’s what they’re what they stated. So it’s a difficult thing to do. And so I think going back in time, it is even harder to find out the ethnicity. The other thing I will say is I have a separate set of research called the President’s 18, and I track turnover rates. So like how long do the most senior people in the President White House stay in those positions? And the reason I got interested in this whole thing was that I noticed sort of, I don’t know, around the late 90s that if you look back at other presidents, it seemed as though people who had these incredible positions, to me they seemed like positions of a lifetime or opportunities of a lifetime, they’d stay in these jobs, they wouldn’t be fired, and they would stay around 18 months. So I just sort of became curious about like how long, if you had a senior position, like head of the domestic policy council, on average, how long do those people stay in their jobs? I also thought it sort of raised interesting parallels to looking at the private sector. So if you look at a business, especially one that’s publicly-traded, people care a lot when the CFO leaves or when someone in the major hierarchy of that organization departs. And these jobs at the highest levels within the White House are arguably as senior and as influential and consequential. So I did look at data and I do have data going back to Ronald Reagan. I have it broken down by gender. I haven’t yet published the demographic outcomes, but I can see just by looking at it that over time, women are getting access to more senior positions and there are more of them overall in the higher ranks of government. But I don’t have any studies or publications at that at this point.

Eric White: Gotcha. I’m sure we’ll be on the lookout for that. And yeah, I want to finish up here by asking where you’re going from here and what you’re looking into next. Are you taking that deeper dive going backwards? Or are you going to have to keep your eyes fixed on the current administration just because there’s already been a couple of changes, key significant changes that we’ve seen over, you know, the first hundred days, even after appointments.

Katie Dunn Tenpas: Yeah, well, that’s a good question. I actually have another sort of angle that I’m looking at these confirmations at, and that is the angle of pace. Because if you look at it, there are actually around 1,300 Senate-confirmed appointments that you as an incoming president are allowed to fill all those positions across the government. The problem is that the pace at which presidents are getting their nominees confirmed, mathematically, they don’t even have a chance to fill all of those 1, 300. So then the question is, what can be done on the other side of the coin. To improve the Senate confirmation process and to make it speedier, such that presidents who have won election and therefore staff the executive branch, give them the actual chance to staff the executive branch. And so what’s happening now and what has happened actually probably for the last four or five presidents is they start to staff and get people confirmed across the executive branch. But after year two, people start to leave these positions. And so then they’re sort of back to the drawing board filling those positions. So… Presidents can’t possibly fulfill all these. And I’m talking these positions that are Senate-confirmed. Most of them are at the apex of various agencies and departments across the government. So they are influential consequential jobs. And so I think one other thing to think about and one other line of research is what kind of reforms might be necessary or be helpful to facilitate presidents when they’re trying to get their nominees through Congress. One idea that the Partnership for Public Service has been promoting is that they believe that there are far too many positions that require confirmation. And we should really go back and do a very close look at all of the positions that require a confirmation and determine like, does this job really need to be a confirmed position? Because there are some that they were lobbied for by Congress to be confirmed position, but over time they’ve sort of lost some of their influence. And so maybe if we could pare down the list of confirmed spots, then it would be easier for presidents to staff a government. And so that’s kind of a project that’s an overall sort of good government. How do we improve things? Because I believe that a staff government is a better government. You don’t want a lot of vacancies at the top.

Eric White: And you forced another question out of me because I’d be remiss to ask you where DOGE factors into your research because just like disrupting a lot of things, you know, that tracking political appointments that are supposed to be confirmed by Congress, all of a sudden, here comes another agency that doesn’t have to face any of that scrutiny. Are you going to maybe start trying to factor that? And if you are good luck, I have to say.

Katie Dunn Tenpas: Yeah, I mean, that’s a tough one. I mean number one, it’s not a department. It has that nice name, but it’s actually, I think, housed in OMB technically. There’s not a lot of public disclosure and I think that’s by design, so that’s problematic. I think we as political scientists and people who care about the functioning of American government, what we really need to do is figure out what they’re doing and what they are dismantling and what positions they’re eliminating and also identify concrete consequences of these staff cuts. I think that they will be known probably in the next three months, if not sooner, because people’s services will be not delivered or there will be some breakdown. I definitely think there is a government breakdown ahead. You can’t just hack a huge proportion of jobs in any single department and expect that there won’t be any fallout. And I am a firm believer in revising civil service laws and even paring down the size of the government. But I just think you have to do it in a methodological way that is based on research. And not just cutting willy-nilly because you want to make headlines or you think there’s certain programs that you don’t like. So that’s the problem. And the challenge for us as people who care about how the government functions is to try to see what’s happening and to document all of the departures and the staff cuts and try to figure out how somebody in the future can put Humpty Dumpty back together again and maybe you do it differently, which is fine, I’m open to doing it differently. But we need to understand the damage that’s been done.

Eric White: Yeah, I just want to challenge you a little bit on that one, just because right before you just talked about how hard it is to fill all of these positions. Isn’t that kind of what you’re thinking maybe? Instead of rather not making them political, what about just eliminating the position if they don’t need to be political, right?

Katie Dunn Tenpas: Well, I think the positions that Doge is cutting are a lot of civil servant positions, so they’re not presidential appointees. When you look at, let’s say, just take the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s a very small number of individuals at the top. I want to hazard a guess, say 10 to 15 that are Senate–confirmed out of thousands and thousands of jobs. So it’s not, there is what we called presidentially appointed. Staff members, Schedule C, other ones that are at departments, but then there’s also the majority of people who work in the government are civil servants and they work there from president to president to president and they have civil service protections and it’s their career to work in the government. So those positions are not affected by individual presidents and presidents don’t appoint those individuals, but DOJ is actually cutting those positions.