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

21. Department of Commerce · Minor · Day one

Fully staff the Office of the Secretary with political appointees

Partially done

665 21. Department of Commerce

“As such, it is vitally important that an incoming Administration fully staff OS with political appointees, send all existing detailees back to their home bureaus on Day One, and replace those detailees with trusted and knowledgeable career staff on an as-needed basis.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The non-Senate-confirmed half of the ask, counted for the first time. OPM's PLUM directory — the continuously updated list of federal policy and supporting positions that the PLUM Act of 2022 requires under 5 U.S.C. 3330f — carries 435 Commerce positions certified by the Department on 2026-06-15, of which 110 sit in the Office of the Secretary and its staff offices. Seventy-one of those 110 are political: 39 Schedule C, 25 noncareer Senior Executive Service, 5 Presidential-with-Senate-confirmation and 2 Schedule A excepted. **Fifty-six are filled and fifteen are vacant** — so seventeen months in, roughly four in five of OS's political slots have somebody in them and one in five does not. The vacancies are not trivial ones: Counselor to the Secretary, Senior Counselor to the Secretary, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff, Director of the Executive Secretariat, Director of Public Engagement, two Deputy General Counsel seats, both Deputy Assistant Secretary for Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs lines, and the Chief Financial Officer / Assistant Secretary for Administration (see #1818). The 39 *career* OS positions in the same directory are 21 vacant — worse than the political ones, which cuts against reading the political vacancies as deliberate. **Unassessed clause:** the Quote's third limb asks that returned detailees be replaced with "trusted and knowledgeable career staff", which names qualities of a person, and this site does not assess an appointee's personal qualities (GLOSSARY.md, *Unassessed clause*). The rung does not turn on it: what holds this at Partially done is the count — one in five political slots in the Office of the Secretary is empty seventeen months in, and "fully staff" is the Quote's own word.

  2. Partially done

    Pierre Gentin confirmed as General Counsel of the Department of Commerce. The Office of the Secretary's principal Senate-confirmed posts are filled, but not 'fully' and not quickly: the General Counsel's seat stood vacant for nearly nine months, an Assistant Secretary nomination was withdrawn on 2025-07-17 and its replacement was returned to the President on 2026-01-03 before being confirmed on 2026-05-18, and no nomination for the Chief Financial Officer / Assistant Secretary for Administration appears in the 119th Congress at all (see #1818).

  3. Partially done

    Paul Dabbar confirmed as Deputy Secretary of Commerce.

  4. Attempted

    Howard Lutnick confirmed as Secretary of Commerce, the first of the Office of the Secretary's Senate-confirmed posts to be filled.

Research log

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

Research notes

The ask is a staffing ask with no single instrument. What is publicly datable is the Senate confirmation record, which is what this entry is leveled on: nominations.ndjson (congress.gov, 2,077 records) filtered to Commerce shows twenty-one Commerce nominations acted on in the window. partial rather than done because the record shows the Office of the Secretary being filled over sixteen months rather than “fully staffed”, with one withdrawal and one returned nomination on the way, and because the number of non-Senate-confirmed political appointees in OS is not published anywhere an agent can read.

Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06 — the non-PAS half is machine-readable, and here is the route. The row asked for the Plum Book or OPM’s political-appointee allocations. The printed Plum Book is a quadrennial snapshot (the 2024 edition, govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-PLUMBOOK-2024/, is pre-window), but the PLUM Act of 2022 replaced it with a continuously updated online directory, and that directory is live and queryable:

  • The human page is opm.gov/about-us/open-government/plum-reporting/plum-data/, which states in its own text that OPM “is publishing data reported by agencies as of June 15, 2026”.
  • Behind it is a Knockout single-page app whose data comes from https://escs.opm.gov/escs-net/api/pbpub/… — get-current-agencies and filter-records, both POST, Content-Type: application/json, body {"agencyId":13248,"componentId":null,"positionStatus":null,"appointmentType":null,"isCFO":false,"isHistorical":false,"currentPage":1,"recsPerPage":2000,"isPaging":false}. A GET returns OPM’s forms homepage with a 404, which is exactly the “a 200 can be a 404” trap in reverse; the POST returns 250 KB of JSON with positionStatus F/V, typeOfAppointment, isActing, isPerformingDutiesOf and a per-agency certificationDate.
  • Department-wide the answer is 435 positions, 270 filled and 165 vacant; 241 career, 83 Schedule C, 79 noncareer SES, 23 PAS, 5 Schedule A, 4 time-limited.

One caution about this source, stated because it matters to anyone who reuses it. The incumbencies are agency-reported and can lag: the Commerce record’s General Counsel line reads Vacant although Pierre Gentin was confirmed to that post on 2025-10-07. Position counts and appointment types are what the directory is for and are what this entry rests on; a single incumbency in it is not proof that a named person has left.

Action
appoint
Object
Office of the Secretary political appointee positions
ID
1815