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

15. Department of Housing and Urban Development · Minor · Day one

Convert HUD career leadership positions into political appointments

Not started

508 15. Department of Housing and Urban Development

“HUD political leadership should immediately assign all delegated powers to politically appointed PDAS, DAS, and other office leadership positions; change any current career leadership positions into political and non-career appointment positions; and use Senior Executive Service (SES) transfers to install motivated and aligned leadership.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The record moved nearby, not the ask's way. No HUD career leadership position has been converted to a political or non-career appointment. The instrument that reaches HUD by name is the appendix to Executive Order 14410, "Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service" (signed 2026-06-03, published 2026-06-10 at 91 FR 34893), which at 91 FR 35058–35059 places sixteen HUD position titles covering twenty-eight position description numbers into Schedule Policy/Career, across six offices: Ginnie Mae (Director of Mortgage-Backed Securities Policy and Programs, 23127U); Community Planning and Development (Division Director, Office of Disaster Recovery Policy Division, 21205U); the Office of General Counsel (Assistant General Counsel, Assistant General Counsel for Legislation, Deputy Assistant General Counsel, Supervisory Attorney Advisor, Supervisory General Attorney and Supervisory Deputy Regional Counsel, eighteen numbers in all); Healthy Homes and Lead Hazard Control (Deputy Director HL0022, Program Advisor HL0035); the Office of Housing (Senior Advisor GS7028, Director of the Home Valuation Policy Division HH0484, Director of the Policy and Risk Management Division HH101A, Director of Servicing & Loss Mitigation HH0599); and Public Affairs (Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Communications GS0691, Supervisory Web Management Officer HQ0238). That is the closest HUD-specific personnel conversion on the record and it is not this ask: the order's own §1 says Schedule Policy/Career positions "are policy-influencing career positions that will be filled based on merit and not political affiliation". It strips adverse-action protections; it does not make the posts political. The one schedule that does create non-career posts, Schedule G (created 2025-07-23), has produced no HUD-specific action in any Federal Register document. Cluster negative search in `docs/research/ch-15.md`.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • Read the operative words before leveling: EO 14410, “Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service” (signed 2026-06-03, published 2026-06-10, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/06/10/2026-11594/implementing-schedule-policycareer-in-the-excepted-service) transfers senior policy-influencing positions into an excepted-service schedule but keeps them career and merit-filled. It removes adverse-action protections; it does not make the posts political. That is the opposite of what a title-match would have suggested, and it is why this item stays at not started rather than being leveled on the government-wide order.
  • How the appendix was read (2026-09-06), and a trap. The order runs to 232 Federal Register pages, of which pages 4–232 are the position appendix — and the appendix is published as images, with no text layer at all: text extracted from every appendix page of https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-06-10/pdf/2026-11594.pdf comes to 282 bytes a page (a running header), and the govinfo HTML and the Federal Register raw text both carry only the 26 KB order text. A term search for “Housing and Urban Development” over any of those returns zero and would have been a false negative on a document that names HUD eighteen times. Two routes past it, both used here: the Federal Register’s public-inspection copy (public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2026-11594.pdf) carries the same appendix with a full text layer (252 pages, 281,625 characters), and viewing pages 166–168 of the govinfo PDF as images shows the HUD block at 91 FR 35058–35059 as printed. The govinfo PDF is the Evidence URL because it is the published document; the public-inspection copy was the reading aid.
  • The government-wide Schedule F / Schedule Policy/Career sequence is tracked as #125 in Chapter 3; this item is HUD-specific and is not leveled on it.
  • A Federal Register search for “Schedule G” since 2025-01-20: 32 documents, of which the only relevant ones are the creating executive order and EO 14410. None is a HUD action.
Action
other
Object
HUD career leadership positions
ID
1405