The Heritage Foundation and its independent partner, Heritage Action for America, on Thursday launched what they describe as a $1 million campaign aimed at expediting Senate confirmation of President-elect Donald Trump’s second-term Cabinet appointments.
The campaign will officially start in the middle of January 2025 and will continue for the entirety of the Senate confirmation process.
The campaign will be twofold, according to a Heritage press release. First, The Heritage Foundation will focus on educating Americans on the importance and history of presidential authority on Cabinet appointments.
In the statement, Steve Bradbury, a distinguished fellow at Heritage and a former general counsel to the U.S. Department of Transportation in the first Trump administration, said the Senate’s “advice-and-consent” function should not “obstruct the president’s ability to put qualified appointees in place.”
“We’ll publish policy papers, give interviews, go on TV, etc., to explain how the constitutional process was designed to work, how it’s gotten abused, and how President Trump can work with Senate leadership to expedite the appointments of his Cabinet nominees and sub-Cabinet appointees,” Bradbury told The Daily Signal in an email.
Heritage Action will seek to fulfill the second part of the campaign—targeting the home states of senators who are on the fence about some of Trump’s Cabinet picks and whose votes could be the determining factor in the Senate confirmation process. Those states include Alaska, Maine, and South Dakota. Alaska and Maine are the home states of two moderate Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, respectively, while South Dakota is home to the new Senate Majority Leader-to-be John Thune.
The campaign’s ultimate aim is to get Trump’s Cabinet nominees confirmed by the Senate and to build unity among Republicans to vote to confirm them, according to Heritage Action Executive Vice President Ryan Walker.
“We’ll run digital ads,” Walker told The Daily Signal. “We’ll do a text-message campaign. We will target the Capitol building with all this content. We will do ‘patch-through calls’ to Congress, from grassroots like our Sentinels, to encourage them to vote ‘yes.’ But it’ll be a friendly pressure campaign to get these folks unified in support of these nominees.”
Walker added it’s important to note historical precedent in understanding the campaign. “In the first four years of the Trump administration [2017-2021], his nominees were under intense scrutiny, and the Senate failed to confirm them in a timely manner, so a lot of his nominees sat waiting for the Senate to take action, and government positions weren’t filled,” Walker told The Daily Signal.
The president of Heritage and Heritage Action, Kevin Roberts, said the American people gave Trump a mandate to take down the deep state.
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“If [Trump] succeeds, it will cement his legacy as the president who confronted Washington’s unaccountable bureaucracy and restored power to the people,” Roberts said in the press release. “His Cabinet choices reflect a commitment to this mission, and now is the time for every conservative to quickly unite behind his nominees and get to work saving this great republic.”
Republicans should unite in support of Trump’s nominees and confirm them as quickly as possible, Walker said.
“We want to get these people into place, into their seats, so they can start implementing the agenda,” he explained. “We [at Heritage Action] want to be flexible in our engagement, and we want to continue this effort through the entirety. We want to be helpful to the Trump administration on getting these nominees confirmed. So, however long that takes, we will be there to support them.”
