The Constitution gives the president the power to “nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, [to] appoint” life-tenured federal judges and many officials in executive branch departments and agencies. Today, the president’s nominations to about 2,000 positions require Senate approval. Here’s how President Donald Trump’s appointment record compares to his predecessors.

Article III of the Constitution provides that Supreme Court justices and judges on “inferior Courts” that Congress may create serve “during good Behaviour,” that is, until they choose to leave or are removed by impeachment. Congress has created three Article III courts: the U.S. District Court, with 673 positions across 94 districts; the U.S. Court of Appeals, with 179 positions across 13 circuits; and the U.S. Court of International Trade, with nine positions. Congress last created new district court positions in 2003 and new appeals court positions in 1990.

Since 1980, an average of 43 new vacancies occur each year when judges die, retire or resign, or take “senior status,” which means they continue to serve, usually with a reduced caseload, and their “active” position becomes open for a new appointment. A president’s opportunity to make judicial appointments, therefore, depends on whether, and how many, vacancies may exist at a particular time.

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Trump first took office in 2017, for example, with 106 vacancies to fill, thanks to Republicans, who controlled the Senate and confirmed very few of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominations during the previous two years. In fact, as a percentage of the judiciary, the confirmation pace during 2015-16 was the lowest in American history.

The picture was very different when Trump took office this time. Democrats controlled the Senate during the last four years and confirmed 235 of President Joe Biden’s judicial nominations, the second-highest total for a single presidential term in history. As a result, only 40 positions on Article III courts were open on Inauguration Day 2025.

The Judicial Appointment Tracker shows that, as of November 20, Trump has appointed 19 judges to Article III courts, a lower total than several previous presidents at this point. Only 24 judges, or 2.8 percent of the judiciary, have taken senior status so far this year, compared to an average of 3.8 percent at this point during the first year of the previous ten presidents. The Senate Judiciary Committee has held a hearing on 96 percent of the judicial nominations it has received, higher than for any new president since 1980.

The picture for executive branch nominations is more chaotic. Senate Democrats have been using Trump’s nominations as proxies in their ongoing fight with him, using procedural tactics that neither party has employed in the past.

First, Democrats have forced the Senate to confirm nominations one at a time by objecting to any request, routinely granted in the past, to confirm them in groups. Second, for the first time in history, Democrats have forced the Senate to take a separate procedural vote on every executive branch nomination before voting on confirmation.

Republicans used the so-called “nuclear option” to address these tactics. This parliamentary step asks the Senate’s presiding officer to interpret Senate rules or apply Senate precedents in a particular way so that a simple majority of Senators can then vote to affirm a favorable ruling. This approach changes the way the Senate operates without having to assemble the 67-vote supermajority required to formally change the text of Senate rules. On September 17, the Senate voted to allow taking both the procedural and confirmation votes that Democrats were using to slow down the process on groups of lower-level executive branch nominations.

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The impact was immediate and dramatic. Before Republicans took this step, both Trump and Senate committees had set a robust pace of nominations, hearings, and approvals that was significantly ahead of Biden in 2021 and Trump in 2017. Those Democrat slow-roll tactics, however, meant that once those nominations reached the floor of the Senate, having cleared the applicable committee, the Senate was able to confirm just 46 percent of those nominations, compared to 76 percent in both 2021 and 2017, when those tactics were not used. Within a few weeks of using the nuclear option to streamline the process, the Senate had confirmed 84 percent of available nominations.

For some reason, however, Trump’s nomination pace has slowed significantly. He has sent only 38 nominations to the Senate in the last two months, compared to more than 150 by Biden during the same period in 2021 and 115 by Trump in 2017. Three-quarters of current judicial vacancies have no nominee to fill them.

The bottom line is that judicial appointments have been on track so far this year while executive branch appointments seem to have been put on that track. As a result, the Senate is able to more efficiently approve nominations once Trump has made them.