President Joe Biden made zero recess appointments during his four years in office. Unlike several of his predecessors, Biden did not use the constitutional power that allows a president to temporarily fill vacant federal positions, including judgeships and executive branch posts, without Senate confirmation while the chamber is in recess.

This is not entirely unusual in modern politics. The use of recess appointments has declined sharply over the past two decades as the Senate has adopted procedural tactics specifically designed to prevent presidents from using the power, regardless of which party controls the White House or the chamber.

The recess appointment authority comes from Article II of the Constitution, which gives the president the ability to fill vacancies that arise when the Senate is not in session. Historically, this tool was used to keep the government staffed during lengthy Senate recesses, particularly before the rise of modern transportation and communication made it easier for senators to return to Washington quickly for votes.

The practice became far more constrained after a key Supreme Court decision in 2014, which addressed appointments made by President Barack Obama to the National Labor Relations Board. The Court ruled that the Senate, not the president, gets to decide whether it is truly in recess, and it set a minimum threshold of several days before a break qualifies as a recess for appointment purposes. That ruling significantly narrowed the window in which any president could act unilaterally to fill vacancies.

In response to that ruling and to political dynamics in Washington, the Senate has routinely held brief "pro forma" sessions during extended breaks, where a single senator gavels the chamber in and out within minutes, sometimes with no other members present. These pro forma sessions are widely understood to be a deliberate mechanism to prevent presidents from claiming the Senate is in recess long enough to justify an appointment, and both parties have used the tactic depending on which party controls the Senate.

Because the Senate maintained this practice throughout Biden's presidency, he never had a recess period long enough, under the Supreme Court's standard, to make a recess appointment even if he had wanted to. Instead, Biden relied entirely on the traditional confirmation process, submitting nominees to the Senate for a vote by the full chamber.

This approach meant that some nominations faced lengthy delays, particularly for judicial seats and certain executive branch positions where confirmation fights became politically contentious. Delays in confirming nominees are a recurring feature of recent presidencies, as the Senate confirmation process has grown slower and more adversarial over time due to the use of procedural holds, extended debate rules, and partisan disputes over qualified nominees.

Biden's lack of recess appointments places him in line with recent trends rather than as an outlier. Presidents in the years immediately following the 2014 Supreme Court ruling have generally avoided attempting recess appointments, recognizing that the pro forma session strategy effectively closes off the option. Before that ruling, recess appointments were more common, with past presidents from both parties using the tool dozens of times over the course of their terms to bypass Senate gridlock on nominations.

The decline in recess appointments has shifted more attention to the Senate confirmation process itself, with presidents and their allies in Congress often focusing on strategies to speed up floor votes or reach agreements with Senate leadership on batches of nominees, rather than attempting to circumvent the chamber altogether.

For Biden specifically, the absence of recess appointments reflects both the practical reality created by pro forma sessions and the legal landscape established by the courts, rather than a deliberate policy choice to forgo the power. The result is a presidency with zero recess appointments on record, a pattern now common among modern occupants of the Oval Office.