In June 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden nominated Robert Forden to be the next U.S. ambassador to Cambodia. Forden, a senior career diplomat, would take the helm of an embassy in a strategically important region of Southeast Asia where Washington is struggling to blunt growing Chinese military and geopolitical influence.
Forden has yet to take the job, however. His nomination has been stuck in the Senate for more than two years, emblematic of a wider backlog of senior national security posts that have sat empty for months or even years amid political impasse in Congress.
Dozens of Biden’s nominees for top national security jobs, including many ambassador posts, have sat unfilled as political disputes and crowded congressional calendars delay or entirely halt the confirmation process.
Both Democrats and Republicans agree that the backlog poses a national security risk as the United States tries to compete on a global scale with adversaries—including Russia and China. And each side blames the other for the mess.
Foreign Policy interviewed a dozen lawmakers, Senate staffers, and current and former senior national security officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations about the issue, as well as reviewed a trove of internal congressional documents on the matter that have not been previously reported on.
While the nomination process has long been mired in delays and politicking, these officials and lawmakers have expressed increasing alarm over how broken the nomination process has become. Tensions between the committee and State Department have flared up over the matter, both in public hearings and behind the scenes.
“It’s really a disaster,” said one senior Democratic Senate staffer, who—like others—spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal committee matters.
Lawmakers and aides expect no fix to the backlog when Congress comes back from recess next month, particularly as both parties shift their focus to the upcoming elections in November.
Republicans have opposed some of Biden’s nominees, including Forden, due to the nominees’ backgrounds, but others are caught in wider policy disputes between Capitol Hill and the administration.
Seasoned Capitol Hill and State Department veterans say that the statistics are startling. Forden’s nomination has sat in the Senate for nearly 600 days, but he is not alone. Margaret Taylor, Biden’s nominee to be the top legal advisor to the State Department, was initially nominated more than 480 days ago. Andrew Plitt, the nominee to be the top U.S. Agency for International Development official on Middle East issues, has sat in limbo awaiting Senate confirmation for more than 330 days even as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza spirals to dangerous new levels. Michael Sfraga, the nominee to be the U.S. envoy for Arctic affairs, was initially nominated 554 days ago; David Kostelancik, a senior career diplomat, was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to Albania 578 days ago.
Erik Woodhouse, the nominee to be the top U.S. sanctions coordinator—a key post for coordinating the economic response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—withdrew his name from consideration after nearly a year of impasse. That post has been vacant since October, 2023.
All told, there are 45 nominees for senior national security posts awaiting action from the Senate.
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is at the center of the backlog. This committee, historically a bastion of bipartisan work even as the rest of Congress descends into hyperpartisanship, oversees the vetting and confirmation for senior jobs at the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and other foreign affairs agencies.
The committee is led by Maryland Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin, the chairman, and Idaho Sen. Jim Risch, the ranking Republican. Cardin took over the committee after Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez was charged (and later convicted) of federal bribery charges related to his ties with foreign governments.
Democrats say that the Republican side is the root cause of all the backlogs. Some Republican lawmakers—including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance (now former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate)—have, in the past, put sweeping blanket holds on Biden’s foreign affairs nominees, which administration officials and Democrats say have wreaked havoc on the nomination process and unfairly put career diplomats in the crosshairs of partisan political disputes.
Democrats now say that Risch is stalling meetings to move nominees out of the committee to the Senate-wide floor votes for confirmation.
“In the past when there’s been a backlog, the chair and ranking member have worked together to make sure we are moving nominees quickly through the committee process,” said the senior Democratic Senate staffer. “The opposite has been happening in this Congress.”
“It’s making the prospect of them getting confirmed in a timely fashion almost impossible,” the staffer added.
Risch and his team strongly push back on these assertions, pointing out that some nominees delayed themselves by not submitting all the proper paperwork on time, and that Risch opposed others on the merits of their credentials.
Risch opposed one batch of nominations, including Forden, for example, over Forden’s tenure as the U.S. Embassy in China’s second-in-command during the COVID-19 pandemic. Risch has alleged that Forden did not do enough to protect embassy personnel from onerous Chinese government pandemic testing and quarantine environments. Forden’s supporters pushed back against this allegation, saying these issues were out of his control as deputy chief of mission in Beijing during an unprecedented and difficult moment in a global pandemic, and that decisions on how the State Department dispatched its diplomats to China and accepted quarantine conditions were made in Washington, not by Forden.
In other cases, Risch said he has held nominees as the sole way to pressure the administration to provide information on administration policies that he said he needed to conduct proper congressional oversight. He also said Democrats have been stalling on GOP-crafted legislation to sanction the International Criminal Court within the Foreign Relations Committee.
“I’ve always worked in good faith to move nominations, even when the same courtesy has not been extended to me,” he told Foreign Policy in a statement. “At this time I am still engaged in serious conversations with the State Department regarding their nominees and my oversight efforts. I have not received adequate information on a number of issues. That said, I have made clear that there is a path forward if the majority party and the State Department would do their part.”
In March, Risch sent a private letter to Richard Verma, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, castigating the State Department for being “unresponsive and dismissive in its attitude toward basic information requests” from the committee, according to a copy of the letter obtained by Foreign Policy. Republicans say this issue has not gone away in the months since.
A spokesperson for the State Department said that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top department leaders, including Varma and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, have engaged with Congress repeatedly to move the backlog. The empty positions are often filled in a temporary capacity by lower-level officials.
Yet the delays are causing increasing anger and frustration on the Democratic side and leading to the perception that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is effectively paralyzed, as Punchbowl News has also reported. “There comes a point in time you’ve got to vote, you’ve got to bring [nominees] up. And if you’re trying to hold them for leverage, I don’t want any part of that,” Cardin told a group of reporters, including Punchbowl and Foreign Policy, last month.
“It’s a perennial problem to get certain people confirmed, but it’s not a perennial problem to see this intense level of obstruction from all levels of nominations, including career diplomats and technocrats,” noted another Democratic aide.
At least 21 of the senior national security positions are for ambassador posts in countries or institutions—such as the United Nations—that the U.S. government considers particularly susceptible to influence from China, according to another Foreign Relations Committee document reviewed by Foreign Policy. All of those countries have Chinese ambassadors in place.
“We are giving up a strategic ability to compete in those countries. … China’s ambassadors are pressing the flesh, cutting deals, getting their narrative out in local media outlets,” Cardin said at a public hearing last month on U.S. competition with China.
“When we don’t have an ambassador in place, our adversaries fill the void,” the State Department spokesperson said.
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