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

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Fill senior OCFO posts with political appointees and create an Appropriations Liaison

Not started

444 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“In addition to evaluating whether the Deputy Chief Financial Officer position should be reserved for a career official, a new Administration should immediately fill these positions with political appointees and establish a new political leadership position for Appropriations Liaison, which is currently overseen by career employees.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The whole political layer of EPA's finance office is now on the record, and the posts the Quote names are not in it. OPM's PLUM listing, as of 15 June 2026, reports twenty-one positions in the Office of Finance and Administration: the Senate-confirmed Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer (Catherine Hanson, confirmed 2025-08-02), one noncareer SES Principal Deputy Chief Administrative Officer, two Schedule C advisers at GS-12, and seventeen career SES directors and deputy directors. There is no Associate Chief Financial Officer, no Appropriations Liaison of any kind, and no Deputy Chief Financial Officer position reported at all — EPA's own page still shows Gregg Treml, the career official who held the deputy role before the window, as Deputy Chief Financial Officer and Deputy Chief Administrative Officer. Nor is this a change from the baseline: the 2024 Plum Book's Office of the Chief Financial Officer block likewise carried a Senior Advisor to the CFO and a Senior Advisor for Implementation and no Associate CFO or liaison post. No EPA document records the evaluation of the Deputy CFO's career status that the Quote asks for first.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • This is an ask to appoint people. Our roster of the Mandate’s credited people records no EPA finance post. The Senate nominations we keep and search confirm the CFO confirmation (PN25-16, roll call 495, 2025-08-02), but the other positions named in the Quote are not Senate-confirmed and so do not appear there.
  • Evidence is attached to the not started event so the page shows the actual staffing: the confirmed CFO is political, the Deputy CFO is not, and the liaison post does not exist.
  • Reviewed 2026-09-06. Status unchanged. The earlier note said EPA publishes no political-appointee directory of the kind ED and HUD do, so sub-CFO appointments could not be checked. EPA does not, but OPM does it for every agency: the PLUM database at opm.gov/about-us/open-government/plum-reporting/plum-data/, published under 5 U.S.C. 3330f and current to 15 June 2026, lists each position with its appointment type (PAS, noncareer SES, Schedule C, career SES), pay plan, grade and duty station. That is a better instrument than an agency directory for exactly this ask, because the Quote turns on whether a post is political rather than on who holds it.
  • A Federal Register full-text search of EPA documents for “Appropriations Liaison” returns none. Re-run 2026-09-06 alongside a nonsense term, which also returned none, and “endangerment finding”, which returned 12, so the zero is a measurement and not a broken query.
Action
appoint
Object
OCFO senior positions and a new political Appropriations Liaison
ID
1201