Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

21. Department of Commerce · Minor

Allocate additional political appointee positions to the Census Bureau

Not started

679 21. Department of Commerce

“To move bureaucracy on key priorities, appointed staff should be in place at the Bureau as early as feasible after a new President takes office. This will require the Office of Personnel Management to allocate additional political appointee positions to the Census Bureau.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Nothing found, and the negative is now a count rather than an absence. OPM's PLUM directory — the statutory list of federal policy and supporting positions — carries 55 Bureau of the Census positions as certified by Commerce on 2026-06-15. Fifty-two are career; **two** are noncareer Senior Executive Service (Associate Director for Communications, held by James Moore Jr.; Chief of Congressional Affairs, held by Robert Hussey IV) and one is Presidential-with-Senate-confirmation (Director of the Census, **vacant**). The 2024 Plum Book lists the Bureau's political positions as exactly the same three — Chief of Congressional Affairs (NA), Associate Director for Communications (NA), Director of the Census (PAS) — so the count of political appointee slots at the Census Bureau is unchanged across the window. OPM allocated nothing additional. Twenty-five of the Bureau's 52 career positions are also vacant, and the Bureau has had no Senate-confirmed Director for the whole window: `grep -i census` over all 2,077 nominations returns nothing. The one Commerce confirmation above the Bureau is Joyce Meyer as Under Secretary for Economic Affairs, eleven months in; the Under Secretary supervises Census but is not an allocation of appointee slots to it.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Cluster negative search CENSUS-1 (chapter log): a jq pass over all 83 in-window Federal Register records whose agency is the Census Bureau — every information-collection notice, every deregulatory rule and every 2030 Census operational notice — plus the DOC/CENSUS slice of reginfo.gov’s Unified Agenda (seven RINs: boundary-date, seal, population-estimate-challenge, decennial-release, personal-data and fee housekeeping), plus grep -i census over nominations.ndjson (0 records) and over presidential-actions.ndjson (0). Also Federal Register full text since 2025-01-20 for "Census Bureau" appointee and Schedule C restricted to the Commerce Department slug; and OPM’s annual notice of career-reserved Senior Executive Service positions (FR 2025-08853, 2025-05-20), which carries no Census change.

The roster (src/data/people.json) was checked first per plan.md mechanic 5 and carries no Census Current office.

Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06. Both instruments the row named turned out to be readable, and together they settle the ask. The route is written up in full in #1815’s notes: the PLUM Act of 2022 replaced the quadrennial printed Plum Book with a live directory at opm.gov/about-us/open-government/plum-reporting/plum-data/, whose data comes from a POST-only JSON API at escs.opm.gov/escs-net/api/pbpub/filter-records. The 2024 printed edition (govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2024/pdf/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2024.pdf, 1.9 MB, 17,485 lines of extracted text, its “BUREAU OF THE CENSUS” heading at line 2336) supplies the pre-window baseline. It is cited here and not in the frontmatter because it is dated 2024 and the evidence gate rightly refuses anything before 2025-01-20; the baseline it establishes is stated in the Status note instead. Comparing the two is only safe for political positions — the printed book and the online directory differ in how completely they list career ones, and OPM’s own page says newly-established entities and acting incumbencies “will be included later” — but political positions are what this Quote asks about, and there the two sources agree on the same three lines.

Action
appoint
Object
Census Bureau political appointee positions
ID
1884