A small but growing number of Senate Democrats are using their power to gum up the works as Donald Trump’s administration continues to flout the orders of federal judges and cut programs which its critcs argue the president’s appointees lack the constitutional standing to end.
Though the minority party lacks the numbers to actually block any of the president’s political appointments without the support of several Republican defections, several senators are signaling that they plan to slow down business in the chamber unless the White House starts listening to them.
Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut was the latest member to join the ranks of a small number of senators who have vowed to place holds on the nominations of Trump appointees under the purview of their committees; the Democratic senator sits on several committees, including Armed Services, Veterans Affairs, Judiciary and Homeland Security. His “hold” is an informal notification of his intent to block the unanimous consent process through which most lower-level appointees are confirmed — to get around it, the Senate Republican majority would need to schedule individual votes on each nomination.
Blumenthal told Axios that he was planning to place holds on all nominations under his committee jurisdictions, increasing the total number of existing nominations under Democratic holds past the current total of around 300. The Independent reached out to his office Tuesday for further comment.
His action expands on a previous announcement from Ruben Gallego, Blumenthal’s freshman colleague on the Veterans Affairs committee. Gallego, in a video announcement released April 1, told viewers that he was placing a hold on nominations to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) until the Trump administration reversed the firings of tens of thousands of employees caught up in DOGE-ordered force reductions across the agency.
The Associated Press reported in March that top VA officials had been informed about a plan to reduce the agency’s size to pre-Covid levels, before the often-beleaguered system was expanded under the Biden administration. Even some Republicans have raised alarms regarding the effects the staff reductions will have on VA services, while Democrats accuse the president of wanting to privatize the agency altogether.
“I’m concerned that they’re trying to cut 88,000 employees from the VA,” Gallego, from Arizona, said in his video statement. “There’s no plan [for] what this means, how this affects services. We actually need to be hiring more people, not firing people.”
“There’s no way they’re gonna cut that many people and have it not affect veterans services,” Gallego said. “So I’m going to do everything I can to try and stop that.”
Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii and (like Gallego) one of the caucus’s younger members, was more blunt in his reasoning for putting holds on around 50 nominees in an interview with Axios.
"Their lawlessness is escalating and they are intentionally destroying the economy, and so I don't think we should make anything easy going forward," said the senator. His comment follows a declaration from the Trump administration that it could not retrieve a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador, with various explanations given. Some of Schatz’s holds are over nominees to the State Department, which in coordination with DHS has worked to cancel student visas for hundreds of international students since January.
None of the Democratic efforts to place holds on nominations will set the Trump administration back indefinitely, but the combined block potentially gives the Senate GOP more work to do while also possibly slowing or hindering the implementation of policy measures at various federal agencies.
Senator Tommy Tuberville pursued a months-long hold on all military promotions at the Pentagon during the Biden administration as the conservative Alabama lawmaker sought to force the Department of Defense to cease funding travel for service members seeking to receive abortion care. His hold eventually grew to affect more than 400 service member promotions and in December of 2023 he finally relented after sharp pressure from colleagues on both sides of the aisle and allegations that he was damaging military readiness for political purposes.
Democrats in the Senate in particular are facing growing pressure from their base to show greater signs of resistance in the face of Trump’s second-term agenda after a group of Democrats led by the party’s minority leader, Chuck Schumer, voted to break a filibuster and allow Republicans to pass legislation to fund the government without securing a deal to reign in Elon Musk’s DOGE effort or halting cuts to non-defense spending.
Schumer, the party’s longtime leader in the upper chamber, is facing historically high disapproval ratings and in a recent poll lagged behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a House member from New York and a rising star in the party, in a hypothetical primary matchup for his own seat.
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