More than a dozen of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees will face a critical test this week in Senate confirmation hearings.
The hearings will be Trump’s first major test in his second time in the Oval Office.
Some of his nominees have also stoked controversy on both sides of the aisle in recent months, raising the stakes for these critical hearings.
The GOP also holds a slim 53-45 majority over the Democratic Party—not counting the two independents who caucus with Democrats—testing the limits of Trump’s influence over his own party.
Any nomination failures, especially with the secretary of defense, threaten to stymie Trump’s first weeks in office by delaying some of his intended institutional changes in government.
This week, 13 Trump appointees will step up to the plate for Senate confirmation, including Pete Hegseth on Tuesday, the president-elect’s nominee to lead the Pentagon. Hegseth is a former officer in the Minnesota Army National Guard, earned the Bronze Star twice, and has previously co-hosted shows on Fox News.
The veteran is also embroiled in multiple scandals, including his reported role in a veterans’ charity group that went bankrupt, an alleged history of alcohol abuse, and a sexual assault settlement with an unidentified woman in California.
Tuesday will also see the confirmation hearing for former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who Trump nominated to lead the Secretary of the Interior and appointed to chair a new National Energy Council.
After previously serving as a member of Georgia’s congressional delegation, Doug Collins was nominated to be the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Collins also sat on the House Judiciary Committee and served as vice chair of the House Republican Conference.
Once an opponent of Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was tapped to be secretary of state, with his confirmation hearing coming on Wednesday. He has taken a tough stance against the Chinese regime and other communist nations.
Trump named South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security after she deployed her state’s National Guard troops to bolster Texas’s Operation Lone Star effort in deterring illegal immigration at the southern border.
After the nomination of former congressman Matt Gaetz to lead the Department of Justice crashed and burned with him withdrawing his name, former Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi will face the Senate Judiciary Committee in two separate hearings on Jan. 15 and Jan. 16 to become the nation’s next attorney general.
Another former congressman, John Ratcliffe, will sit through both open and closed hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Wednesday before he can helm the Central Intelligence Agency. He was previously director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term.
Energy and fracking expert Chris Wright, who was tapped as secretary of energy, has to face the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday.
For the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, Trump nominated Russ Vought to serve as director. Vought’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee comes on Wednesday.
With the Department of Transportation, which includes the Federal Aviation Administration, Trump turned to another former congressman, Sean Duffy, also a co-host on Fox Business.
Thursday will see the confirmation hearing of Scott Bessent for secretary of the treasury. Bessent, a Trump 2024 campaign economic advisor and cryptocurrency advocate, is also a Wall Street veteran and founder of international investment firm Key Square Group.
The new Environmental Protection Agency administrator may be former New York state representative Lee Zeldin, if he passes the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s test on Jan. 16.
Finally, Scott Turner must face the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee on Thursday before he can lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Turner previously served as Trump’s executive director for the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council.
—Jacob Burg, Andrew Thornebrooke
BOOKMARKS
The nation’s food prices—which have been steadily rising for years—are projected to increase by 1.9 percent in 2025 following a 2.3 percent increase in 2024, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. University of Miami professors David Andolfatto and David Kelly attribute the growing prices to factors including high oil costs, continued supply chain disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, and crop diseases.
Vice President-elect JD Vance said in an interview on Sunday that individuals who were violent during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach “obviously” should not be pardoned. Vance said those who “protested peacefully” should receive pardons, but that there is also a “little bit of a gray area” in some of those cases after President-elect Donald Trump had previously vowed to use his clemency power for those who were charged in connection to the incident.
More than a year into the most expensive war in Israel’s history, its leaders are assessing the economic toll on the nation after the conflict disrupted agriculture, tourism, and foreign investment in its high-tech sector. The country’s economy expanded at a healthy annual rate of 3.8 percent in the third quarter of 2024, with the Israeli Stock market climbing by more than 28 percent last year—an all-time high. Home buying, which signals economic recovery, is also up.
For decades, children, specifically poor white girls in various towns in northern England, have been targeted and groomed by Pakistani-heritage men, while local officials turned a blind eye to the abuse due to fears of being labeled racist or destabilizing community relations. The “Grooming Gangs” scandal received increased scrutiny after a graphic court transcript of a rape victim from a notorious Pakistani-heritage grooming gang operating in the north of England caught the eye of U.S. readers on social media platform X recently. Billionaire Elon Musk quickly jumped onto the subject, attacking Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government.
Russian military history expert David Stone said during a Jan. 6 podcast appearance that Moscow is unlikely to assist Beijing in the event of a protracted war between China and a U.S.-led coalition in the Indo-Pacific. Stone referred to the recent downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, where Russia has air and naval bases but was otherwise unable to deploy the necessary resources to sustain Assad’s regime.
—Jacob Burg
