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Levin urges end to hold on Pentagon nominees

Two months of unexplained delay on four top Pentagon nominations is long enough, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman said Thursday.

At issue are nominations to fill vacancies for the Pentagon’s top personnel official, someone to oversee defense acquisition reform, and two key Air Force posts — the service undersecretary and assistant secretary for installations.

The armed services committee unanimously approved the Obama administration’s picks for the jobs Dec. 2, but final confirmation by the Senate has been postponed because an anonymous senator has put a hold on the nominations.

“We have service members willing to risk their lives in defense of the nation,” Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the armed services committee chairman, said Thursday. “The least we can do as a Senate is to confirm nominees to the critical positions to lead the Defense Department. If anybody has a problem with these nominees, would they please come to the floor and tell us? We have heard nothing.”

One senator — Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. — acknowledged in December that he was responsible for holding up the Air Force nominees while trying to get information about contracts involving aerial tankers. Sessions and Levin, however, have not talked about the hold, according to Levin.

Placing a hold on nominations is an informal practice under which any senator can anonymously prevent a confirmation vote simply by notifying the staff in the senator’s respective party’s legislative office. No reason has to be given. A hold lasts for seven days at a time and can be renewed indefinitely without explanation.

In the case of the Pentagon nominations pending since December, it is clear that the hold has been placed by a Republican senator or senators, because the objection to bringing the nominees to a vote is coming from Republican floor leaders.

“We don’t know of any problem,” Levin said. “We know their qualifications and they are extraordinary in every one of their cases.”

One nomination on hold is for retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Clifford Stanley to become undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, a post in which he would oversee military and civilian personnel policy — including possible repeal of the military’s gay ban.

Stanley “was the first African-American regimental commander in the Marine Corps, and he served with honor and distinction,” Levin said. “We are lucky that we could get someone like Gen. Stanley to fill this position, to come back into public service. I think there is unanimous consensus that he is extraordinarily qualified. No one has brought any problem with this nomination to my attention.”

Another nomination that Levin says shouldn’t face any question is for Erin Conaton, staff director of the House Armed Services Committee, to become Air Force undersecretary.

“We all know her. Nobody has raised an issue about her,” Levin said.

The other nominees frozen by the hold are Frank Kendall III, nominated to be principal deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, and Terry Yonkers, nominated to be assistant Air Force secretary for installations and environment.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen both have made an appeal to the Senate to approve the nominations, Levin said.

Complaints about holds are nothing new, but efforts by the Senate to eliminate the practice — or to at least require senators to make public what they are doing — have failed over the years.

After Levin spoke on the Senate floor, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., the Senate’s assistant majority leader, said he was one of those who had used holds on nominees in the past. “I am not 100 percent pure,” he said. “But I always state my purpose.”

Durbin said he had used holds in an attempt to get federal agencies to “do things they said they would have done long before,” and that he released the holds when agencies acted.

“I think if it is done with transparency and in a timely way, we can live with it,” he said of the practice.

Like Levin, though, Durbin said he didn’t see why Stanley’s nomination to be the Pentagon personnel chief was frozen, since “it is clear that he is qualified.’