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

6. Department of State · Notable

Base State Department human rights policy on the Commission on Unalienable Rights report

Not started

192 6. Department of State

“The commission’s report is a roadmap for revamping and reenergizing U.S. human rights policy and should be the basis for both structural and policy changes throughout the State Department.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The Commission on Unalienable Human Rights and its report are not named in any allowlisted in-window record. A Federal Register full-text search for the quoted phrase "Commission on Unalienable Rights" since 2025-01-20 returns 0 documents, and "unalienable rights" returns four presidential proclamations (Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, the Year of Celebration and Rededication, and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence), none about State Department policy. No page in the state.gov sitemap index carries the word — re-harvested in full on 2026-09-05 to 68,057 URLs, against which a control query confirmed the site search itself is unusable — and neither the FY 2025 nor the FY 2026 index of State's statutory reports to Congress lists anything on the commission or its report. The Department's own Human Rights policy page was read on 2026-09-05: it is a reverse-chronological feed of 1,931 items with no statement of interpretive basis, and the commission is not named on it. The commission's 2020 report itself is now reachable only in the `2017-2021.state.gov` archive; the live-site path for it returns State's "Technical Difficulties" page. The Department did narrow its human rights reporting - the 2024 Country Reports, released 2025-08-12, cover the statutorily required ground - and reorganized the human rights function under an Under Secretary for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs, and Religious Freedom, but neither is presented as implementing the commission's report. Recorded under the cluster negative searches for ticket 09 batch 09b in `docs/research/ch-06.md`.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

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

Research notes

Every source this Status rests on is allowlisted and was read in full; none of it was off the allowlist or unreadable.

  • How far the state.gov negative reaches, re-measured 2026-09-05. State’s own site search cannot show that something is absent: every query returns an ordinary page that is not an answer, and unrelated queries return the same results, as does the site’s built-in WordPress search. We used three substitutes instead. (1) The sitemap: state.gov’s sitemap index, a real index of 85 sub-sitemaps, harvested in full to 68,057 URLs (an earlier count of 42,098 was too low), with press releases running 2025-04-24 to 2026-09-05. (2) The reports-to-Congress indexes, which cover what the sitemap cannot: State posts its statutory reports as PDFs in the site’s uploads folder, and WordPress does not put uploads in a sitemap, so a sitemap negative is a negative about pages and says nothing about documents. The FY 2026 index (122 reports under section 7016(b) of Div. F of P.L. 119-75) and the FY 2025 index were both read in full. (3) A web search limited to state.gov, which is what turned up the uploaded PDFs.
Action
other
Object
Report of the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Human Rights
ID
518