The United States is a little weird compared to other developed countries in terms of how we hand over control of the government – even before the challenging, to put it mildly, transition we had this year. “We do this odd thing of basically lopping off the top of the pyramid of our senior employees across the federal government and asking presidents to make roughly 4,000 political appointments,” said Katherine Dunn-Tenpas, a senior fellow at UVA’s Miller Center. “And of the 4,000, roughly 1,300 or so require Senate confirmation,” she said.