Trump Picks a New Attorney General Nominee After Gaetz Withdraws

Trump Picks a New Attorney General Nominee After Gaetz Withdraws

Matt Gaetz
Sipa USA
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey
Thursday, November 21, 2024

Happy Wednesday! That gust of air you felt earlier was members of Congress all exhaling in relief because…

Trump Picks Pam Bondi for Attorney General After Gaetz Withdraws

President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he has picked former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as his next nominee to serve as attorney general, replacing former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew his nomination earlier in the day.

Gaetz’s withdrawal comes after he told reporters yesterday that he’d had a “great day” of meetings with senators about his nomination. “Folks have been very supportive,” he said. “It’s a great day of momentum for the Trump-Vance administration.” Asked whether he was confident he could get confirmed by the Senate, Gaetz replied, “It was a great day.”

Apparently not. His withdrawal announcement abruptly ends a controversial bid that had been clouded from the get-go by allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use. Gaetz denied wrongdoing, but he reportedly concluded after Wednesday’s meetings that he would not be confirmed. At least five Republican senators opposed his nomination, more than the three he could afford to lose, according to NBC News.

“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” Gaetz wrote in a post on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General.”

Trump made clear he expects Bondi to approach the Justice Department’s top job in much the same way Gaetz had promised. “For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans - Not anymore. Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again,” Trump said in a social media post. “I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!”

Gaetz, who resigned from the 118th Congress last week after being nominated, was re-elected to the 119th Congress earlier this month and while it’s unclear whether he could return to the House in January, he is reportedly not expected to do so. In his resignation letter last week, Gaetz wrote: “I hereby resign as U.S. representative of Florida’s 1st Congressional District effective immediately. And I do not intend to take the oath of office for the same office in the 119th Congress to pursue the position of attorney general in the Trump administration.”

Trump, in a post on his social media site, said he appreciated Gaetz’s efforts to win approval. “Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!" the president-elect wrote.

Lawmakers and Justice Department officials are generally relieved that Gaetz, widely despised in Congress, has withdrawn. “This is the only decent thing Matt Gaetz has ever done,” one unnamed House Republican told Axios.

What’s next: At least three other Trump nominees — Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence — face serious doubts about whether they are fit for the jobs they’d fill.

Gaetz’s withdrawal could also impact those or other Trump staffing picks. The Gaetz nomination was widely seen as the biggest test of how far Republican senators would go to acquiesce to Trump’s wishes. Will GOP senators now feel emboldened to oppose other Trump choices? Or will they fall in line behind other nominees for fear of disrupting Trump’s agenda?

One House Republican predicted to Axios that Gaetz's fate is “indicative of what will happen” with the three other nominees facing serious doubts. On the other hand, there’s this: “The controversy surrounding Gaetz has already served a purpose for Trump — whether intended or not. It has made other Trump choices for cabinet picks appear more reasonable by comparison,” writes Jonathan Swan of The New York Times. “There has been very little attention, for example, given to the fact that Trump intends to nominate his personal lawyer Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general. Blanche is among the potential substitutes for Gaetz.”

The Associated Press and The New York Times both report that Republican senators are rallying around Hegseth despite allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman in 2017. Hegseth says the encounter was consensual and that he was cleared by investigators.

Marjorie Taylor Greene to Coordinate With Cost-Cutting Effort by Musk, Ramaswamy

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial Republican firebrand from Georgia, said Thursday that she will head a new House subcommittee that will coordinate with the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump-sanctioned effort run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to slash federal regulations and employment.

Greene and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer have already met with Ramaswamy and his team ahead of the subcommittee’s formal creation, CNBC reports.

Comer said that starting early next year, the new Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency will focus on executing the Trump administration’s goals of streamlining operations and cutting red tape. “I look forward to working with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to deliver on these goals to Make America Great Again,” he told Fox News.

Comer said there are “too many fat cats in government,” and vowed that the DOGE committee will get the “chopping block going.”

In a statement provided to CNN, Greene said she planned to work “hand in hand” with President-elect Donald Trump and the DOGE team. “Our subcommittee’s work will expose people who need to be FIRED,” she said. “The bureaucrats who don’t do their job, fail audits like in the Pentagon, and don’t know where BILLIONS of dollars are going, will be getting a pink slip.”

Greene said she plans to hold hearings and investigate waste broadly. “No topic will be off the table,” she said, per Fox News. “The goal of DOGE is to bring accountability and GUT useless government agencies.”

Chart of the Day: Unauthorized Spending

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy said this week that they plan to target billions of dollars in “unauthorized” federal spending as part of their effort to trim waste from the budget.

“DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood,” the duo wrote in an op-ed at The Wall Street Journal.

A July 2024 report from the Congressional Budget Office states that spending on programs whose authorization had expired totaled roughly $516 billion in fiscal year 2024. But as Aimee Picchi of CBS News explains Thursday, much of that unauthorized spending is for basic programs such as veterans’ healthcare, the Federal Aviation Administration and assorted defense and security programs — programs that Congress very much intended to fund, but for whatever reason failed to take the additional steps to authorize formally. It’s not clear that the lack of authorization indicates anything other than a bureaucratic misstep or oversight, driven perhaps by the political dysfunction that tarnishes much of what happens in Washington on a regular basis.

As the chart below shows, veterans’ healthcare is by far the largest single item, accounting for $119 billion of unauthorized spending in 2024. Kelly Rissman of the Independent reports that the Veterans’ Health Care Eligibility Reform Act of 1996 helps provide the funding for veterans’ healthcare, but the authorization for the program expired in 1998. Congress keeps funding the program, though, and will likely continue to do so, whether the formal authorization is in place or not.

That’s not to say that the lack of authorization isn’t a problem, or that the DOGE project won’t use a lack of authorization to target programs. NASA’s budget of roughly $25 billion appears to be unauthorized, and that could open the door for Musk and Ramaswamy — one of whom owns a massive private space transportation company — to push for its reduction or elimination. The Head Start program is unauthorized, as well, and that could pave the way for the Republicans to finally end a program they have long criticized.

Overall, though, the potential savings appear to be far smaller than the $516 billion figure suggests. Congress intends to spend most of the money that is currently unauthorized, and whatever reductions that occur because of a lack of authorization will likely fall far short of the $500 billion target cited by the DOGE masters.

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