President Donald Trump has matched the number of U.S. attorneys confirmed during former President Joe Biden’s first year in office, even as his administration has faced a string of high-profile defeats over controversial prosecutor appointments and clashes with the Senate over confirmation rules.
With the Senate’s approval of a year-end nominations package last week, lawmakers confirmed a total of 31 Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys in 2025, matching Biden’s first-year total. The figure undercuts concerns that Trump’s Justice Department has stalled, despite months of legal setbacks involving loyalist prosecutors installed outside the traditional Senate confirmation process.
There is no doubt that those setbacks involving high-profile nominees have been significant — but the upside is that he is keeping pace with his predecessor. It comes as New Jersey U.S. Attorney Alina Habba resigned earlier this month after a federal court upheld her disqualification, triggering the departure of Delaware U.S. Attorney Julianne Murray and placing several other Trump-installed prosecutors under renewed scrutiny. Courts have also stripped or threatened to strip U.S. attorneys in Virginia, California, Nevada, and New York of their authority, prompting the administration to reassess its strategy.
The losses have come amid a broader fight over the Senate’s “blue slip” process, a long-standing Judiciary Committee practice that allows home-state senators to effectively block U.S. attorney and judicial nominees. Trump has repeatedly attacked the practice, calling it a “scam” and urging Senate leaders to abolish it.
“‘Blue Slips’ are making it impossible to get great Republican Judges and U.S. Attorneys approved,” Trump wrote in a recent social media post, directing Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to move toward eliminating the practice. Thune has repeatedly rejected the idea, and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has shown no interest in scrapping it.
“Chairman Grassley wants President Trump’s nominees to be successful,” a spokesperson for Grassley told the Washington Examiner. “Nominees without blue slips don’t have the votes to advance out of committee or get confirmed on the Senate floor.”
Despite the public standoff between Trump and Republicans over blue slips, insiders on the Senate Judiciary Committee say the confirmation pipeline is moving at a historically strong pace. With the latest nominations package clearing the Senate, Republicans confirmed 13 U.S. attorneys and one senior Justice Department official as part of a broader slate of 97 executive nominees. Four of the 31 confirmed U.S. attorneys received blue slips from Democratic senators.
Committee aides say every U.S. attorney nominee for whom the administration has submitted complete background investigations and paperwork has been advanced, and that the primary bottleneck has been the White House’s pace in sending materials.
Much of the friction has been exacerbated by procedural resistance from Senate Democrats, who earlier this year placed blanket holds on U.S. attorney nominees. As a result, confirmations that once cleared by voice vote have instead required roll call votes in committee and on the Senate floor, dramatically slowing the process and forcing leadership to bundle prosecutors into large nomination packages.
Even so, Trump sharply accelerated confirmations in the final months of the year. As recently as September, just two of his U.S. attorney nominees had been confirmed. By late December, that number climbed to 31 following approval of multiple bundled nominations packages.
Legal experts say the administration’s recent moves suggest a reluctant pivot back toward the traditional confirmation process after courts repeatedly rejected its attempts to keep acting or interim prosecutors in place.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, recently told Politico the White House appears to be narrowing its options.
“I think the last thing they want is to have the Supreme Court say no,” Tobias said, referring to the possibility of appealing disqualification rulings. “Because then the game is over.”
Still, Tobias described the recent uptick in Senate-confirmed prosecutors as a positive sign, even if many are not in the most politically sensitive districts.
“That’s promising for the system,” he said.
The Judiciary Committee’s progress extends beyond prosecutors. The Senate has confirmed more federal judges at this point in Trump’s current term than at the same point in his first administration. As of late December, at least 26 of Trump’s judicial nominees have been confirmed, whereas he only had 19 confirmations to the judiciary by the same date in 2017, according to an appointments tracker from the Heritage Foundation.
And thanks to Republicans’ use of blue slips in the last Congress, Trump has nominated 15 judges this year to seats that remained vacant during the Biden administration, and the committee has held hearings for 96% of judicial nominees it has received, the highest rate for any new president since 1980.
In August, Grassley touted this strategy as a reason to keep the blue slip tradition in place, posting to X: “The 100 yr old ‘blue slip’ allows home state senators [to have] input on US attys & district court judges In Biden admin Republicans kept 30 LIBERALS OFF BENCH THAT PRES TRUMP CAN NOW FILL W CONSERVATIVES.”
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The chairman, however, has also publicly urged the administration to accelerate its submissions of nominees.
With the year-end nominations package now cleared, Trump closes out 2025 having matched Biden’s first-year benchmark for U.S. attorneys, even as his most aggressive efforts to bypass Senate advice and consent unraveled in court. The result is a mixed but measurable outcome of headline-grabbing defeats for a handful of loyalist prosecutors, alongside confirmation numbers that quietly keep pace with the previous administration.