The Supreme Court has limited use of recess appointments, but GOP lawmakers could go along with Trump’s plan.
Topline
President-elect Donald Trump has suggested he wants to use “recess appointments” to confirm his Cabinet nominees when he takes office, a process that could allow controversial picks like former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to avoid a contentious Senate confirmation process—but may be hard to implement in practice.Key Facts
Trump said on Nov. 10 the incoming GOP-controlled Senate must be willing to allow recess appointments, “without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner.”
Recess appointments are when presidents name officials to jobs that normally need Senate confirmation when Congress is in recess, meaning officials can be confirmed simply because the president says so, rather than having to go through a lengthy Senate confirmation process and get the approval of a majority of senators.
That means controversial Trump picks who may not be able to get enough support in the Senate to be confirmed could still be able to get into their roles, like Gaetz, whom Trump has nominated as attorney general, plus Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services nominee Kennedy.
Recess appointments are permitted by the Constitution and were created by the Founding Fathers to ensure the government could function even when lawmakers were sometimes out of session for months at a time, given that it took much longer for them to travel back to make a vote—with Alexander Hamilton referring to them in the Federalist Papers as “nothing more than a supplement … for the purpose of establishing an auxiliary method of appointment, in cases to which the general method was inadequate.”
While recess appointments were widely used for years—Presidents Bill Clinton and George W.
