A fair share of nominees with conventional GOP backgrounds could glide through the Senate, but others are bracing for fireworks.
A fair share of nominees with conventional GOP backgrounds could glide through the Senate, but others are bracing for fireworks.
N ext week, Donald Trump will reenter 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with an ambitious legislative agenda and a long list of cabinet picks that he believes will reflect the ideologically diverse coalition of voters who elected him to a second term.
The next challenge for the president-elect and his team is muscling this cast of characters through the full Senate.
The upper chamber is kicking off confirmation hearings this week for more than a dozen cabinet picks; other nominees’ hearing schedules have yet to be announced. After clearing the committees of jurisdiction, nominees will then advance to consideration by the full Senate, where they will need 51 votes to get confirmed. Vice President–elect JD Vance can break a tie.
As things stand, the president-elect benefits enormously from a 53-seat Republican majority that has expressed deference to confirming most of his nominees as quickly as possible. And Trump’s list of 2025 cabinet picks includes a fair share of familiar GOP faces whose conventional GOP backgrounds will help them glide through the confirmation process without a hitch.
On deck this week is secretary of state–designee, U.S. senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), who heads into his Wednesday hearing with the support of multiple Senate Democrats, including John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and the party’s whip, Dick Durbin of Illinois. Other conventional GOP cabinet picks such as Scott Bessent and Sean Duffy — the president-elect’s picks to lead the Treasury and Transportation Departments — are also expected to coast through the confirmation process without much partisan fanfare.
Other nominees are bracing for fireworks, even as the confirmation odds are trending in their favor. This week, the spotlight is falling on defense secretary–designee Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard veteran and former Fox News commentator whose rocky past few weeks in the news cycle came to a head during Tuesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing.
After this week, the Senate will consider the nominations of unconventional choices such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and Tulsi Gabbard, the president-elect’s nominee for director of national intelligence. The two MAGA converts are former Democratic presidential candidates who endeared themselves to Trump in the final months of the 2024 campaign.
“Certainly, they reflect this president’s own coalition and his desire to broaden the Republican coalition,” Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), who plans to support all of Trump’s cabinet picks, said in a recent interview with National Review.
Long before Gabbard and Kennedy were tapped to serve in the incoming administration, Trump allies predicted that their decision to leave the Democratic Party represented a larger transformation in the GOP coalition.
“I think we have an overall political realignment where common sense Democrats like Kennedy, like Gabbard” and others are “gravitating to the ‘America First’ party,” longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone told reporters inside the president-elect’s watch party on Election Night.
And yet other Republicans pour cold water on the notion that some of Trump’s unorthodox picks represent an earth-shattering GOP shift in policy. Yes, their argument goes, some of these cabinet picks have a long history of breaking with mainstream GOP positions and even the president-elect on a range of issues. But as members of the cabinet, these officials will not be given unilateral control over their departments — they would be charged with enacting the president-elect’s agenda. For these reasons, political observers shouldn’t “read too much,” in ideological terms, into some of Trump’s more unconventional cabinet picks, Senator John Kennedy (R., La.) told NR last month. Trump made a conscious choice to “pick outsiders” for top slots in his administration, he added — a move Kennedy called “prudent” given that Trump’s campaign “promised change.”
“But I think President Trump’s cabinet members are going to be on a short leash,” the Louisianan observed. “A lot of policy is going to be established by President Trump himself and his White House.” These cabinet secretaries are going to be “more vessel-like,” he added, “in the sense that their job is to implement policy that is given to them.”
This time around, the president-elect will also rely on a host of seasoned White House veterans who worked with him during his first term, including former federal prosecutor and senior Department of Defense official Kash Patel, who has been nominated to lead the FBI, as well as former director of the Office of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, nominated to lead the CIA. Trump also tapped former Office of Management and Budget director Russ Vought to serve in the same role during his second administration. Vought’s hearing is scheduled to kick off on Wednesday afternoon.
The confirmation hearing process will soon heat up for Kennedy, the environmental lawyer and Democrat-turned-independent 2024 presidential candidate whom Trump tapped to lead HHS. A scion of one of America’s most famous Democratic families, Kennedy dropped out of the 2024 race and became a Trump campaign surrogate. Speaking before a crowd of the president’s supporters at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in October, Kennedy said the country’s Democratic elites have abandoned liberal values to become the “the party of Wall Street, of big banks, of Big Data, of Big Tech, of the military contractors, Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Chemicals.”
He has earned plaudits from a host of Republican lawmakers who are eager to restore public trust in health-related agencies.
“He’s interested in transparency and scientific integrity,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) told NR in a recent interview. “He’s not going to go in there like a bull in a China shop and just mandate and command things.”
But Kennedy is also facing tough questions from Senate Republicans on a range of issues, including his historical support for abortion rights and his rhetoric surrounding vaccines. His pledge to go to war against the “pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs and toxic waste” that “permeate every cell in our bodies” also has some anti-regulatory and agricultural-state Republicans on edge.
On the vaccine-skepticism front, reporters are keeping a close eye on former Senate GOP leader and childhood polio survivor Mitch McConnell. “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous,” McConnell said last month. “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”
Gabbard may also run into trouble. A former Hawaii representative, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, Gabbard is under fire for her dovish congressional foreign-policy record that is seen by many as largely out of step with that of most Republicans who sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has jurisdiction over her nomination.
To win over some of her Senate skeptics, Gabbard has pledged to support the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — legislation she sought to repeal while in Congress. “If confirmed as DNI, I will uphold Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights while maintaining vital national security tools like Section 702 to ensure the safety and freedom of the American people,” she said in a statement to Punchbowl News.
Another curious pick to traditional conservative types is the president-elect’s labor secretary–designee. An Oregon House Republican who recently lost reelection to her Portland-area seat, Lori Chavez-DeRemer is the daughter of a Teamster with a legislative record that is far more pro-union than that of the average Republican in Congress. She is blazing ahead with her nomination, taking a trip to Mar-a-Lago last month to interview candidates who could serve under her in senior Labor Department roles.
Democrats are warming to her nomination. Chavez-DeRemer is a “smart” cabinet pick on Trump’s part given the electoral gains Republicans made this cycle among union members, Senator Fetterman insisted in a recent interview with NR.
“I never understood why they seemed to be anti-union in the past,” he said.
As nominees prepare for contentious hearings, they remember the fate of fierce Trump ally and former Florida representative Matt Gaetz, the president-elect’s first pick for attorney general who had to withdraw his name from consideration once it became clear to him and the president-elect that he could not overcome serious obstacles to Senate confirmation. As NR reported at the time, Senate Republicans made clear to Trump that wariness over Gaetz’s bid went well beyond ethics-related concerns and included worries over the firebrand Republican’s temperament, character, support for marijuana legalization, and ability to lead a bureaucracy as massive and complex as the Justice Department. Trump’s new attorney general–designee, Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general, is on track for confirmation.
Days out from Trump’s swearing-in, Senate Republicans are optimistic that they can get at least a few cabinet picks confirmed as soon as Inauguration Day.
“The president ought to have his team in place early, especially his national security team,” Senate GOP whip John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) told the New York Times over the weekend. “If Democrats try to drag out the process, the Republican Conference is ready to work around the clock, including weekends and nights, to get them in place.”