How the Senate Now Confirms a President's Team in Batches, and Where the Count Stands in 2026

The problem the rule was built to solve

Every president starts a term needing to staff the executive branch, and the Senate confirms the people who run it. For most of the chamber's history each of those nominees could be made to travel alone. A single senator could force a cloture vote, and once cloture was invoked the Senate still had to burn up to two hours of floor debate on that one name before moving to the next. Multiply that by hundreds of subcabinet officials, ambassadors, and agency heads, and the math becomes the story: the calendar runs out long before the list does.

That is the bottleneck the Senate rewrote in the fall of 2025. The tool it reached for was the majority's power to reinterpret its own rules, the maneuver commonly called the nuclear option, and the change it made was narrow in what it covers and large in what it does.

What changed, in September 2025

On September 11, 2025, the Senate voted 53 to 45 to establish a new precedent allowing it to confirm an unlimited number of executive branch nominees en bloc, meaning in a single grouped vote, rather than processing each one individually (CNN, September 11, 2025; NBC News, 2025). The mechanics run in two steps. First the Senate adopts an executive resolution that lists the nominations to be taken up together. Then it votes on the whole group at once (Congressional Research Service, R48729, 2025).

The limits matter as much as the grant. The new procedure applies to executive branch nominees subject to the standard two hours of debate. It does not apply to Cabinet level nominees, and it does not apply to judges, both of which must still be confirmed one at a time (NBC News, 2025; Congressional Research Service, R48729, 2025). It also changes who can slow things down. Under the precedent, senators in the majority may still object to pulling an individual name out of a block, while the minority loses the leverage to force each nominee into a separate fight (NBC News, 2025).

The count since the change

The first test came quickly. On September 18, 2025, the Senate confirmed its first bundle under the new rule, 48 nominees cleared on a 51 to 47 vote (PBS NewsHour, September 2025). The batches grew from there. In late July 2026 the Senate advanced a group of 74 nominees on a 50 to 47 vote, and by that point the running total of civilian nominations confirmed en bloc since the rules change had reached 375, roughly 63 percent of all the confirmations of President Trump's second term (Senate Republican Leader, 2026).

By early August 2026 Senate Republicans reported that about 95 percent of the president's civilian nominees had been confirmed, with more than 100 still pending (Senate Republican Leader, 2026). The pace is the point of the whole exercise. What used to be a name a day is now dozens of names in an afternoon, and the confirmation record of the term is largely a record of these grouped votes.

The line the rule did not cross

The most important word in the 2025 change is one it left out: judges. Judicial nominations were carved out of the en bloc procedure and still move individually, each on its own vote (Congressional Research Service, R48729, 2025). That is why the pace of the courts is a separate measurement from the pace of the agencies, and why US Political Rank scores them on their own ledger in the appeals court confirmations by president. A president can fill an agency in a batch. A president fills the bench one seat at a time, and the Senate keeps it that way on purpose, because a lifetime appointment is treated as heavier than a term appointment.

The distinction is not a small one. Executive officials serve at the president's pleasure and leave when the administration does. Federal judges hold their seats for life. The 2025 rule sped up the first category and deliberately declined to touch the second, which is the clearest signal in the whole change about what the Senate still considers worth a full and separate debate.

A ladder, not a single leap

This is where the honest history matters, because the 2025 precedent did not appear out of nowhere. The Senate has been lowering the walls around nominations for more than a decade, and both parties have carried bricks. In 2013 the majority ended the 60 vote threshold for most executive and judicial nominees below the Supreme Court. In 2017 the majority extended that to Supreme Court nominees. In 2019 the Senate cut post cloture debate time for many nominees. The 2025 en bloc precedent is the next rung on that ladder, not a break from it.

US Political Rank takes no position on whether the change is good for the Senate. It reports the count and the rule that produced it. The same standard applies to how the 60 vote wall still governs ordinary legislation, traced in the century of the Senate's cloture rule. Nominations now clear on a simple majority in bulk. Bills that lack 60 votes still die. The chamber runs two different speed limits at once, and knowing which one applies is the difference between reading a headline right and reading it wrong.