Kathryn Dunn Tenpas

Staffing the top levels of the executive branch is a high-priority task for new presidents. Roughly 4,000 presidentially appointed positions are spread across the executive branch, and appointees to the most senior positions (nearly 1,200) require Senate confirmation. Throughout the 2020 presidential campaign, then candidate Joe Biden promised to select a diverse set of appointees. This article examines President Biden's commitment to this pledge as well as the pace at which the Senate confirmed his first tranche of appointees. To assess President Biden's performance during the first 300 days of his administration, I compare his record to his three immediate predecessors (Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump). The data reveal that while President Biden fulfilled his promise by appointing record numbers of women and non-Whites, the pace at which these appointees were confirmed was much slower than those of his three predecessors.

The staff turnover in Biden's first year marked "one of the lowest of the past six administrations," wrote Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who tracks the issue, in an analysis of Biden's first year.

That's Katie Dunn Tenpas, who studies presidential personnel at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. "I think just generally in the aftermath of the Trump administration, this was an important feature of the new Biden administration. And you need to remain consistent."

Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a nonresident senior fellow with Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, published an analysis on Thursday––the one year anniversary of President Biden’s Inauguration––about turnover in the administration in its first year. This was a massive issue under the previous administration.

Over the course of its first year, President Biden’s team faced several well-documented challenges—but staffing the White House was not one of them. Although he had a truncated transition due to the General Services Administration’s unwillingness to “ascertain” that Joe Biden had won the election, a record breaking 1,136 appointees were sworn in on Inauguration Day. This study focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on turnover in the president’s “A-Team,” defined as senior executive-office positions that do not require Senate confirmation.

Scholar Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, who authored the Brookings report, tells Axios the findings reflect "a core stability within the administration" and "not a lot of drama. They're trying to sort of recoup where we were before the Trump administration."