Lawmakers Seek to Unclog Road to Confirmation

WASHINGTON — Hoping to unclog the Senate and spare scores of presidential appointees from what is often a grueling confirmation process, leading lawmakers in both parties are moving to cut the number of administration posts that are subject to Senate approval.

The proposal to end Senate review of about 200 executive branch positions would be the most serious effort in recent years to pare the chamber’s constitutional power of advice and consent. It amounts to a rare voluntary surrender of Congressional clout, and it has high-caliber, bipartisan support with the endorsement of the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.

“We are losing very good people because the process has become so onerous, so lengthy and so duplicative,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and a leading advocate of the bill. “Why should there be a full F.B.I background check back to age 18 for an individual serving on a part-time board?”

Ever since the Senate rejected President George Bush’s selection of John G. Tower as secretary of defense in 1989, Senate confirmations have become bruising public affairs that delve deep into a nominee’s background. President Obama’s initial picks for several cabinet posts withdrew their nominations after the process turned up embarrassing details.

Several presidents, frustrated by delays, have sought to bypass the process by making so-called recess appointments while Congress is not in session. Mr. Obama used that tactic last summer to install the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Backers of the confirmation measure say they want to ease what they call an arduous chore for midlevel nominees trying to navigate the Senate in a supercharged partisan era. While it would not affect senior positions, the legislation, and a related proposal to expedite filling about 250 part-time positions, is intended to reverse an explosion in confirmable posts from about 280 when President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961 to 1,400 today.

Yet it is never easy to tinker with the rules in an institution renowned for its resistance to change.

Looking at the list of assistant secretaries, department directors, chief financial officers and advisory board members who would be removed from the Senate docket, some conservatives see an effort to give the White House carte blanche to extend bureaucratic sprawl. The change would also limit the leverage that lawmakers have over the administration by reducing the number of appointments they could block in order to win concessions or other considerations.

Writing for the conservative Heritage Foundation, David S. Addington, who served as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, urged defeat of the bill, saying the drafters of the Constitution “did not give the president the kingly power to appoint the senior officers of the government by himself.”

Conservative senators have raised similar objections.

“Allowing the president to appoint czars and bureaucrats without Congressional oversight adds to the problem of an ever-expanding, unaccountable government,” said Moira Bagley, a spokeswoman for Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who has expressed objections to the measure.

Others worry that officials exempted from confirmation will lose stature among colleagues who will consider the posts to be downgraded.

And some say the Senate, where the slow pace and partisan maneuvering over confirmations has kept high-level offices vacant for extended stretches, is being too timid and should consider more far-reaching changes for all presidential appointees.

“This is a start, but it doesn’t address the real problems with the rules or with the confirmation process,” said Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, who has proposed shortening the time that lawmakers can debate a nomination after cutting off a filibuster to 4 hours from 30. “These are baby steps.”

Mr. Udall helped push the Senate into considering an overhaul of the confirmation process early this year when he threatened to force a floor fight on a proposal to limit filibusters. To avert a showdown, the leadership agreed to look at procedural changes, and the proposal to cut the number of Senate confirmations was one result.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the No. 3 Republican in the chamber and a former cabinet secretary, said the jump in jobs that require confirmation has cut into the Senate’s time for more pressing issues and put an unnecessary burden on nominees.

“We drag some unsuspecting citizen through this gauntlet of investigations and questioning,” said Mr. Alexander, who has dubbed the process the “innocent-until-nominated” syndrome. “They are very fortunate if they get all the way through without being made to appear a criminal.”

The legislation, which cleared the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this month, would remove roughly 200 positions — many of them public affairs or Congressional-relations jobs for various agencies — from Senate scrutiny. Among the more notable positions on the list are the United States treasurer, which officials say has become a mainly ceremonial position, and the director of the Mint.

Authors of the bill said they picked positions they did not consider central to setting policy or spending money. For instance, the list includes the assistant secretary of agriculture for Congressional relations; the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration; and the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, among others. The bill also proposes to end confirmation of the chief financial officers in many agencies.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who leads the governmental affairs committee, said the reduction in jobs requiring confirmation should enable presidents to fill vacancies more quickly.

“Eighteen months into the Obama administration, 25 percent of his nominees were still unconfirmed,” Mr. Lieberman said. “This is not an aberration.”

In addition to exempting the 200 jobs, the measure would create a working group in the administration to report within 90 days on proposals to create a single “smart form” intended to allow nominees to “answer all vetting questions one way, at a single time.”

The legislation — which would need to be approved by both chambers of Congress, though the House generally defers to the Senate on such matters — is intended to be supplemented by a new Senate rule that would automatically place the names of dozens of appointees to boards and commissions on the Senate calendar for approval once they have submitted a required questionnaire. Senators would have 10 days to intervene.

“Instead of spending our time confirming an appointment to the Literary Society Board or the Morris K. Udall Scholarship Fund, we should be working on reducing the debt,” Mr. Alexander said. “We still end up with more than 1,000 nominees, which is more than President Clinton had and four times more than President Kennedy appointed.”