Oklahoma Delegation Reacts To President-Elect Trump's Cabinet Picks

President-elect Donald Trump continues to move quickly to name the people he wants in his cabinet, running government agencies once he's in office. But some of the names he's announced are catching even Republicans by surprise.

Within Oklahoma's all-GOP delegation, there are certainly some unspoken concerns with one or two of Trump's picks, but no member of the delegation has openly criticized any of them and, on the whole, there is strong support for the people Trump is nominating.

"I think the president is really good about surrounding himself with the right people at the right time," said Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), a very close ally of Trump, in an interview this week.

Each day now, the President-elect seems to add more people to his list. Thursday night, at a gala at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announced North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — not Sen. Mullin, as some were speculating — his pick for Secretary of the Interior.

"We're gonna do things with energy and with land — interior — that is going to be incredible," Trump told the crowd.

Most of Trump's picks will need Senate approval, which isn't expected to be a problem for choices like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.

"Rubio's résumé and street cred and just, you know, who he is as an individual," said Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK2), "I think was an incredible pick."

But confirmation is not a given for picks like vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services. And the selection of Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, for Attorney General, caught Sen. Mullin a bit by surprise.

"Matt Gaetz and I, there’s no question that we’ve had our differences," Sen. Mullin told Jake Tapper on CNN this week. "I completely trust President Trump’s decision-making on this one, but at the same time he’s got to come to Congress and sell himself … there’s a lot of questions that are going to be out there; he’s got to answer those questions."

Asked about the Gaetz nomination in an interview Thursday, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) said that vetting candidates is part of the process and both Democratic and Republican presidents have seen nominations fail.

"Immediately with some nominations, there's a large scale sense of ‘Yep, I like that person,'" Lankford explained, "and then some others we look at it and say, 'OK, there's lots of questions here that need to be answered before anyone moves on it.' That's the normal process to be able to go through for every president."

That process is likely to begin very shortly after the new Congress is sworn in Jan. 3, 2025, about two weeks before Donald Trump takes the oath of office on Jan. 20.