Assemble and deploy the EPA political appointee team before Day One

Research notes

• Our roster of the Mandate’s 322 credited people records one current EPA office: Aaron Szabo, Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation, confirmed 2025-07-24, six months after Day One.
• Corrected 2026-09-01. Status unchanged. The note asserted the 2025-07-24 confirmation while citing only the Zeldin roll call, which cannot evidence it. The confirmation is Szabo’s, and we already held the right citation for it; EPA’s own release of that date is now attached to the event (fetched 2026-09-01) and the appointee is named in the note. The Status never rested on the missing citation — it rests on the absence of any Day One roster — but a reader following the Evidence would have found the wrong vote.
• Negative search (2026-08-27): among the Senate nominations we keep and search, there is no EPA nomination confirmed on or before 2025-01-20; no EPA or White House page publishes a Day One appointee roster.
• Reviewed 2026-09-06, with a negative result. Status unchanged. The open lead was “EPA’s own list of political appointees as of 2025-01-20”. A government-wide list exists — OPM’s PLUM database under the PLUM Act, opm.gov/about-us/open-government/plum-reporting/plum-data/, which reports every EPA policy and supporting position with its appointment type and was current to 15 June 2026 when read — and it cannot answer this ask. It publishes present incumbency, not a roster as at a past date, and its record for each position carries no appointment date. The printed 2024 Plum Book is the other candidate and is worse for this purpose: its data is as of 16 July 2024 and its incumbents are the outgoing administration’s.
• So the finding is that no published roster fixes who was in place at EPA on 2025-01-20, and none is likely to appear. The Status rests where it did — on the absence of any Day One roster, plus the two confirmations that are dated and are both after Day One — and the negative says how far it reaches: it covers OPM’s statutory appointee reporting, EPA’s own pages and the Senate’s confirmation record, and it cannot reach who walked in the door on the first morning under a delegated or acting appointment.
• Worth noting against the second half of the Quote, which asks that Senate-confirmable nominees serve as Deputies or Principal Deputies from Day One while their confirmations proceed: the PLUM listing shows EPA’s Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator posts filled by noncareer SES appointees across OAR, OCSPP, OECA, OLEM, OW and OITA. That is the arrangement the Quote describes, observed eighteen months in; it is not evidence about Day One and so changes nothing here.