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

2. Executive Office of the President · Minor

Appoint a Special Assistant to the President for life and family policy

Not started

62 2. Executive Office of the President

“Specifically, the President should appoint a position/point of contact with the rank of Special Assistant to the President or higher to coordinate and lead the President's domestic priorities on issues related to life and family in cooperation with the Domestic Policy Council.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No Special Assistant to the President for life and family issues has been appointed or created. The instrument that settles this is the Annual Report to Congress on White House Office Personnel, which lists every White House Office position by name, status, salary and title: in the report as of 2026-07-01, no position title in the White House Office contains the word life or the word family. The Domestic Policy Council the Quote names is staffed — a Director at Assistant to the President rank, two Deputy Assistants to the President for Domestic Policy and six Special Assistants to the President for Domestic Policy — but none of them carries the life-and-family portfolio in the title, and the coordinating point of contact the Quote asks for exists nowhere on the list. The administration has acted on the subject — EO 14216 on access to in vitro fertilization, EO 14182 enforcing the Hyde Amendment, EO 14205 establishing the White House Faith Office, and EO 14359 of November 2025 on foster care and adoption — but none of them creates a coordinating post. EO 14359, the closest fit, assigns the work to the Secretary of Health and Human Services "in coordination with the Office of the First Lady"; the words Special Assistant, Assistant to the President and Domestic Policy Council appear nowhere in it.

Research log

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

Research notes

Negative search. Read EO 14359 in full at govinfo. In the federal records we keep and search: all 277 executive orders listed by title; a search of White House presidential actions for “special assistant” returns nothing establishing such a post; our roster of officials has no matching current office.

Correction, 2026-09-01. Status unchanged, negative re-grounded. The earlier negative closed with “appointments at Special Assistant rank are frequently announced only in White House personnel releases, so a record could exist that we did not find” — an open-ended caveat where a closed instrument exists. The Annual Report to Congress on White House Office Personnel is the statutory list of every White House Office employee and title (3 U.S.C. 113), it is the instrument every other Chapter 1 appointment ask on this site is leveled against, and it is the source of our roster’s own White House entries. The 2026 report, as of 2026-07-01, was fetched and read in full (a PDF of 507 personnel lines). Findings:

  • A search of every position title for “famil” and for the word “life”: no match. There is no post for life and family policy at any rank.
  • Domestic Policy Council staffing, which the Quote names as the body to coordinate with: Vincent Haley, Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council; Heidi Overton and James Sikma, Deputy Assistants to the President for Domestic Policy; Corey Ensslin, Jackson Lane, Maxim Lott, Theodore Merkel, James Sherk and Daniel Wasserman, Special Assistants to the President for Domestic Policy. Six posts at exactly the rank the Quote asks for, none of them designated for this portfolio.
  • Our roster’s one White House Office entry, Andrew Guernsey, comes from this same report and appears there as “GUERNSEY, ANDREW I., DETAILEE, SENIOR POLICY ADVISOR” — a detailee below Special Assistant rank, with no life-or-family designation in the title. The roster’s entry and this item’s negative now rest on the same document and agree.

Reach of the negative: this covers the White House Office establishment as of 2026-07-01 completely, because the report is a complete list of it. It does not cover an informal portfolio given to someone whose title says something else, which no document could rule out.

Re-verified independently, 2026-09-06. An open question asked for the text of the 2026 report to be searched for a life/family portfolio and for Andrew Guernsey’s exact title. Both reports were re-fetched and read from scratch. The 2026 report confirms the two findings above verbatim — a search of its position titles for “life” or “famil” finds nothing, and Guernsey appears as “GUERNSEY, ANDREW I., DETAILEE, $174,922.00 Per Annum, SENIOR POLICY ADVISOR” with no portfolio in the title. Two details the earlier check did not record, both of which strengthen the negative: listing every “SPECIAL ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT” title in the 2026 report gives 51 distinct posts, of which the nearest thematic neighbors are “Deputy Director for Faith Engagement” and “Director of Policy for the First Lady” and none carries a life or family designation; and Guernsey does not appear in the 2025 report at all, so his detail began between July 2025 and July 2026 and is not a long-standing arrangement the earlier read might have missed. Status unchanged.

Action
appoint
Object
Special Assistant to the President for life and family issues
ID
103