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

6. Department of State · Minor

Fill non-Senate-confirmed State posts with political appointees

Partially done

173 6. Department of State

“The next Administration should assert leadership over, and guidance to, the State Department by placing political appointees in positions that do not require Senate confirmation, including senior advisors, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretaries, and Deputy Assistant Secretaries.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The practice reached a second rank. Spencer Chretien — a political appointee in the first Trump administration (Special Assistant to the President and Associate Director of Presidential Personnel) with no Foreign Service career — became Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs on 2026-04-20, after serving as Senior Bureau Official for Population, Refugees, and Migration. With the Policy Planning directorship (2025-01-20) that is senior advisor, bureau-head and DAS level covered by named appointees. It stays `partial`: the Quote names three ranks, no Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary appointment was found, and nothing on an allowlisted source says the acting-career pattern the January note described has been replaced across the DAS and PDAS ranks.

  2. Partially done

    A political appointee was in the Secretary's own non-confirmed senior staff from the first day: Michael Anton became the 33rd Director of the Office of Policy Planning on 2025-01-20 and served to 2025-09-15. That covers the “senior advisor” end of the Quote; the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary ranks it also names were still largely filled by career officers in acting capacity through 2025 (the Department's biographies directory lists a run of “Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary” and “Acting Director” entries).

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The Department’s senior-officials directory (https://www.state.gov/biographies-list/, 24 pages of ten) is the roster of the posts this Quote names; it gives titles and bureaus but does not label an official political or career, so individual dated biographies were used instead.
  • Boundary, settled on review (2026-09-01): moved from done to partial. The earlier reading called it done on two named political appointees plus the Policy Planning directorship, on the ground that the Quote asks for a practice rather than a headcount. But the Quote names three ranks — senior advisors, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretaries and Deputy Assistant Secretaries — and the record here reaches two of them by one appointee each, against this item’s own January 2025 finding that the PDAS and DAS ranks were still largely career officers in acting capacity. An open-ended “place appointees across these ranks” ask is done only with the named object in the asked-for state or an allowlisted statement that the sweep is complete; neither exists, and no published figure separates political from career at these ranks. Pieces delivered, so partial.
  • The divergence with #463 on the same biographies now shows in the two Statuses: #463 (partial) reads the Anton appointment as the one day-one placement against a Department whose bureaus stayed in career or acting hands for months, and this item reads the same directory the same way.
  • state.gov could not be read on 2026-09-01 (an identical 659,508-byte error page for every address), so this change of Status rests on the biographies as already recorded here; no Evidence was added or changed.
  • Related: #460, #462, #463.
Action
appoint
Object
Non-confirmed senior State Department positions
ID
461