5. Department of Homeland Security · Minor
Give the DHS Secretary a dedicated team of political appointees
Printed page 136 5. Department of Homeland Security
“A key first step for the Secretary to improve front-office functions is to have his or her own dedicated team of political appointees selected and vetted by the Office of Presidential Personnel, which is not reliant on detailees from other parts of the department, to help ensure the completion of the next President's agenda.”
What has happened
- Not started
The roster shows individual political appointees across DHS, and the dhs.gov Homeland Security Advisory Council announcement names a Chief Advisor to the Secretary, but nothing found establishes the dedicated, detailee-free front-office team the Quote asks for. How far the search reaches (§3b): it covers the Federal Register, DHS's own newsroom and this project's roster, and it is strong about published instruments and weak about internal staffing. The Federal Register does name departmental officers — the roster dates DHS's own Chief Privacy Officer from the contact block of a 2025-03-26 Privacy Act notice — but it names them in the documents they sign, and constituting a front-office team produces no Federal Register document of any kind. So the absence here is an absence of any public instrument, not an absence in a register that would have recorded the act.
No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
This ask is about appointments, so we checked the roster of Mandate contributors in office first. Four of them hold DHS offices (Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar, 2025-03-06; Chief Privacy Officer Roman Jankowski, 2025-03-26; USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, 2025-07-15; Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Matthew Kozma, 2025-07-31), but none of those current offices is the dedicated Office of the Secretary team this Quote describes.
Searched, in records current to 2026-08-28: presidential documents, final rules, proposed rules and notices in the Federal Register from DHS and its components; bills and public laws in Congress, from congress.gov; White House presidential actions; and federal court dockets (CourtListener), including the bulk snapshot of 1.2 million dockets. No DHS management directive establishing such a team, and no Office of Presidential Personnel document, was found on an allowlisted source.
- Action
- appoint
- Object
- dedicated team of political appointees in the Office of the Secretary
- ID
- 281