Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina Nine months into his term, much of JOE BIDEN’s administration remains depleted at the top ranks. At the Treasury Department, only three senior officials have been approved by the Senate. Ten nominees are still waiting to be confirmed. At the State Department, only 14 have been confirmed with dozens still waiting. The dynamic is similar at the Defense Department where several nominees have languished all summer, to say nothing of the ill-fated nominations of NEERA TANDEN and DAVID CHIPMAN to lead OMB and the ATF respectively. In total, there are 190 nominees currently waiting for Senate confirmation, according to the Partnership for Public Service’s latest tally. And the delays are about to get worse. The Senate is grappling with a series of deadlines — staving off a government shutdown at the month’s end, hitting the debt ceiling sometime in mid-October, and trying to pass the multi-trillion dollar reconciliation package — for which Democratic leaders are still gaming out possible solutions. On top of that, some ambitious Republican senators eyeing presidential runs in 2024 are blocking a bunch of Biden nominees to advance their own agendas. For months, Sen. TED CRUZ (R-Texas) has imposed a de facto blockade on dozens of State Department nominees, including ambassadors, over his ongoing displeasure with the Biden administration’s handling of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. And Sen. JOSH HAWLEY (R-Mo.) last week pledged blanket opposition to moving State or Defense department nominees until Defense Secretary LLOYD AUSTIN, Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN and national security adviser JAKE SULLIVAN resign over the Pentagon’s mishandling of the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan (which, shall we say, seems unlikely). Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair BOB MENENDEZ (D-N.J.) has also publicly threatened to tie up Pentagon nominations if Austin doesn’t testify before his committee on Afghanistan soon. Those obstacles are surmountable, assuming a majority of the Senate is determined to vote for a nominee’s confirmation. But doing so would likely require hours of Senate floor time — which, again, is going to be at a premium this fall. Absent a major breakthrough, the White House could enter the holiday season without making much of a dent in its considerable backlog. And that backlog could grow, as Biden still has to nominate people for at least 170 other confirmable positions. The practical consequence of the administration’s confirmation bottleneck has been to further centralize decision-making power in the White House, rather than the Cabinet. White House officials are already in place since they do not require Senate confirmation, and have the advantage of working closer to the Oval Office. The West Wing’s centrality was already evidenced by the fact that Biden’s White House has more staff than the Obama or Trump White House’s ever did. There’s plenty of blame for the logjam to go around. The Trump administration did Biden no favors during the transition, nor did the lengthy negotiations between Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER (D-N.Y.) and Minority Leader MITCH McCONNELL (R-Ky.) to organize a 50-50 Senate at the beginning of the year. And Democrats were forced to tackle things like a Covid relief package early on, while prioritizing other confirmation votes like judicial nominees before using the Senate calendar to fill out the department ranks. To that end, at least, Biden has been broadly successful. Last week the Senate confirmed the 10th and 11th Biden appointees to the federal bench. Another two would-be judges are teed up for floor votes this week, which, if confirmed, would put Biden’s pace on judicial confirmations ahead of every newly elected president since RICHARD NIXON in 1969. It’s not clear what the White House’s strategy is to speed things up. “It is critical that the Senate move forward with these qualified, experienced nominees as quickly as possible,” deputy press secretary CHRIS MEAGHER said in an email. “We hope some Senate Republicans will cease using time-consuming delay tactics to slow the confirmation process – even though many nominees have received strong bipartisan support – so these public servants can help build back our economy better and advocate for American interests abroad.” Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you LEAH WONG, the deputy associate counsel for the office of presidential personnel? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. Or if you want to stay really anonymous send us a tip through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram, or Whatsapp here. | 
