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

4. Department of Defense · Minor

Appoint a Special Assistant to the President for recruiting and retention

Not started

102 4. Department of Defense

“Appoint a Special Assistant to the President who will maintain liaison with Congress, DOD, and all other interested parties on the issue of recruiting and retention.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Moved nearby, not delivered. The Secretary of Defense directed the establishment of a Military Service Recruitment Task Force, "jointly chaired by the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs", to "develop an integrated recruiting strategy that aligns policy, communication, and outreach initiatives". That is the recruiting-liaison function the Quote wants, placed inside the Department rather than in the White House, and it is chaired by officials rather than by a Special Assistant to the President; retention is not among its named tasks. The ask is for a presidential appointee maintaining liaison with Congress, DOD and other parties, and no such post exists. Searched in this pass: `src/data/people.json` (322 entries, no matching Current office); the 119th-Congress nominations Corpus (2,077 records — the post would not need confirmation, and none appears); the whitehouse.gov presidential-actions Corpus; the Federal Register full-text API for recruiting-related presidential documents since 2025-01-20 (0 results); and the complete Department of War press-release archive for the window, enumerated as 500 items back to 2025-01-02 through `war.gov/DesktopModules/ArticleCS/RSS.ashx?ContentType=9&Site=945&max=2000`, in which the task force is the only release matching `recruit` or `retention`. The Office of the Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness leadership page, as observed 2026-09-06 — the page carries no date of its own, so it is dated at the observation and is approximate — lists an Under Secretary, a Deputy Under Secretary and named senior advisors, and no recruiting-and-retention liaison.

Research log

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

Research notes

An appointment ask, worked from our roster of the people the Mandate credits first: it holds 322 people and no Current office matching a Special Assistant to the President for recruiting and retention. The one “Special Assistant to the President” on the roster is a Deputy Counsel in the White House Office.

Searched 2026-09-06. We looked for the Department of War personnel announcements and for a Primary record of Darin Selnick performing the duties of Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. Two things came back. The first: war.gov is not walled, but its news pages carry no listing that can be read page by page and no sitemap; its RSS feeds of news stories and of releases can be, each capped at 500 items, which is enough to reach 2025-01-02. The second: the premise about Selnick was stale. As observed 2026-09-06, prhome.war.gov names Anthony J. Tata as Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness and Sean O’Keefe as his deputy; the office has a confirmed head, so there is nothing to date from an acting designation. Neither fact changes this ask, which is about a White House post. https://prhome.war.gov/ — leadership block, as observed 2026-09-06.

  • Unified Agenda, read 2026-09-01. The Department of War’s full 2026 Unified Agenda was read at reginfo.gov (111 active RINs across the Air Force, Army, Navy, the Corps of Engineers, Health Affairs, the DFARS council and OSD), not the abbreviated version the Federal Register prints. No entry creates a White House or DoD post for recruiting and retention, which is unsurprising: an appointment is not made by rulemaking. The only recruiting-adjacent entry is DFARS RIN 0750-AM19, Certification Requirement for Military Recruitment Advertising (DFARS Case 2024-D022), Proposed Rule Stage — an NDAA-mandated certification about contracts placing recruitment advertising, already published as an NPRM on 2026-06-25 (2026-12826). Subject area, not this ask’s object; an agenda entry counts only when it names the ask’s own object. https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202510&RIN=0750-AM19
Action
appoint
Object
Special Assistant to the President for recruiting and retention
ID
163