Posted on December 21, 2025
The Senate has adjourned for the year, finishing some (but not all) of its transportation-related nominations work.
Last night, the Senate confirmed a large en bloc package of 97 nominees that included the following transportation-related nominees:
- Stephen Carmel, to be Administrator of the Maritime Administration.
- Laura DiBella, to be a Federal Maritime Commissioner for a term expiring June 30, 2028.
- Trent Morse, to be a Member of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority for a term expiring May 30, 2030.
- Michelle A. Schultz, to be a Member of the Surface Transportation Board for a term expiring November 30, 2030.
Other nominees were not so lucky. Per an ancient Senate rule, any nominees who are still pending but where the Senate has not yet taken action are automatically sent back to the President at the end of a session, and it is up to the President whether to re-nominate them once the Senate comes back for its next session. If the President does re-nominate them, they go back to committee. They usually don’t have to have a second hearing (especially if it’s the same Congress), but the committee has to vote again to approve them and place their names on the Executive Calendar.
The Majority Leader was able to negotiate a unanimous consent agreement to protect a long list of uniformed military and Foreign Service promotions and allowed those nominations to remain “status quo” between sessions. But all of the other pending nominees did not make the unanimous consent list in these partisan times and will be sent back to the White House at noon on January 3, when the First Session of the 119th Congress formally expires.
The nominees who will be sent back to the White House are:
- Ryan McCormick, to be Under Secretary of Transportation for Policy
- Daniel Edwards, to be Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Aviation and International Affairs
- Seval Oz, to be Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Research and Technology
- Edward Eppler, to be Chief Financial Officer, Department of Transportation
- Robert Harvey, of Florida, to be a Federal Maritime Commissioner for a term expiring June 30, 2029
- John DeLeeuw, of Texas, to be a Member of the National Transportation Safety Board for the remainder of the term expiring December 31, 2026
- Richard Kloster, of West Virginia, to be a Member of the Surface Transportation Board for a term expiring December 31, 2028
Of those, McCormick and Oz had been approved in committee and were pending on the Executive Calendar. Eppler’s nomination is on the privileged list and was waiting for DOT to transmit some paperwork that would have allowed his nomination to bypass committee and go straight to the Calendar. And the others were still pending in the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.
Despite that setback, 2025 has been a successful year for the Trump Administration in getting senior people confirmed by the Senate at the Department of Transportation, as seen in the following table.
The blank spaces tend to be where the Trump Administration does not want the post filled. The Inspector General’s whole job is to keep an eye on the Administration and report wrongdoing to Congress: this Administration is temperamentally opposed to that mission. The whole idea of the new Assistant Secretary for Aviation Consumer Protection is to pursue rulemakings like the ones the Trump Administration is actively repealing that were promulgated by the previous Administration. And the Trump Administration left the Transportation Policy and Governmental Affairs jobs vacant for years during its first term in the name of budgetary savings.
