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

26. Trade · Minor · Contested — excluded from counts

Fill the Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade post wisely

Partially done

794 26. Trade · from “The Case for Fair Trade”

“Less obvious—but almost as important—is the need to fill the position of Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade wisely.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The Senate confirmed William Kimmitt as Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, 51-47 (Record Vote 443). The post - the head of the International Trade Administration, which runs the antidumping and countervailing duty machinery and the section 232 investigations - was filled, and the International Trade Administration lists him as Under Secretary, describing "expertise in international trade, national security, economic competitiveness and industrial policy". Whether the choice was "wise" is not a checkable fact; that the position was filled, and filled with a trade-remedy practitioner who then ran the section 232 investigations into semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, robotics and unmanned aircraft systems, is. Capped at partial on 2026-09-01 by the site owner's decision on disposition asks: the post is filled and the confirmation is dated, but the Quote asks that it be filled 'wisely', which names a disposition no evidence can close, so the ask cannot be recorded as finished.

Research log

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

Research notes

An ask whose adverb - “wisely” - cannot be researched. The reading taken is that the checkable core is whether the named post was filled, and by whom; the alternative reading, that an unfalsifiable ask can never leave not started, is a different rung and is flagged in .scratch/research-phase/spot-checks.md alongside the same question for #2094 and #2096.

commerce.gov/about/leadership answers 403 to a browser User-Agent; trade.gov is fully open, but note the trap: a wrong path under trade.gov returns HTTP 200 with a ~250 KB page, so the status code proves nothing there and the body has to be read. Both URLs above were read.

Action
appoint
Object
Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade
ID
2095