In response, Puzder has now twice taken the awkward step of issuing public statements confirming that, yes, he still wants the job. “I am fully committed to becoming secretary of labor and I am looking forward to my hearing,” he said in the most recent of his reaffirmations, sent this week through a spokeswoman after Alexander postponed his hearing for the fourth time.

People familiar with Puzder’s situation—on and off Capitol Hill—say he has agreed to divest his assets from CKE and is now going back and forth with the Office of Government Ethics on the precise mechanism for doing that. The Washington Post reported that Puzder initially wanted to put his assets into a blind trust but was told he had to divest completely. While several other wealthy Trump nominees have had to take similar steps to separate from their businesses, a spokeswoman for Puzder noted that his undertaking “is a complex process as CKE is a private company.”

To veterans of the appointments process, Puzder’s experience is a case study in why new administrations should vet potential nominees for financial conflicts of interests before naming them to their posts—something the Trump transition did not do in assembling the Cabinet. In Puzder’s case, that would have meant having him fill out financial-disclosure forms and briefing him on what divestment steps he would need to take in advance. As Richard Painter, the former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me last month, it is common for wealthy candidates to withdraw from consideration once they find out how time-consuming and costly it will be for them to untangle their financial conflicts. That’s exactly what happened to Trump’s nominee for Army secretary, the billionaire investor Vincent Viola, who on Friday backed out of the job after reportedly concluding it would be too difficult to separate himself from his businesses.

Nominees in the past have had to give up millions in future earnings from stock options they hold in their companies. “It’s a rare person who has full appreciation of what's involved in going through this process,” said Max Stier, the president of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization that has advised presidential transition teams, including Trump’s. “It’s protection both for the administration as well as the nominee or potential nominee to be able to have that private preview.

“That would have the better approach,” Stier added.

While the lack of early vetting has delayed the confirmation of Trump’s Cabinet picks, it has yet to derail any of their nominations in the Senate. Republicans have largely stood behind the new president, and Democrats have less power to block any of the candidates because of a rules change they engineered in 2013 lowering the effective threshold for confirmation from 60 votes to 51. Still, as the White House has discovered in watching the experience of Betsy DeVos, its nominee for education secretary, the GOP’s 52-48 majority in the Senate is slim. Two Republicans are opposing her, and DeVos will need the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Mike Pence to win confirmation. The fight over Puzder’s nomination is sure to be just as fierce.