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

5. Department of Homeland Security · Minor

Hire significantly more political appointees in the Office of the General Counsel

Not started

162 5. Department of Homeland Security

“OGC should hire significantly more Schedule C/political appointees who in turn supervise career staff and manage their output.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The count exists, and it does not show this. OPM's Federal Workforce Data employment snapshots for December 2024 (pre-window) and June 2026 were downloaded and counted on the `appointment_type` field. Department-wide, DHS's **Schedule C (Excepted Service Nonpermanent) appointees rose from 77 to 145**, and within the DHS Headquarters sub-element — the one that contains the Office of the General Counsel — from **50 to 111**. But the series breakdown is what this ask turns on, and it is flat: DHS Headquarters Schedule C appointees in the **General Attorney series (0905) went from 1 to 2**; every other headquarters Schedule C position in both snapshots sits in the catch-all Miscellaneous Administration and Program series (0301), which grew 49 → 109 and covers the Secretary's office, public affairs, policy and legislative affairs as well as the general counsel. So the department did hire significantly more political appointees, and nothing in the record attributes that growth to OGC or shows it supervising career attorneys. Moved nearby, not delivered. The limit of the measurement, stated plainly (§3b): OPM publishes to sub-element, not to office, so a count of OGC's own Schedule C appointees does not exist in any public dataset, and the attorney-series figure is the closest proxy available.

Research log

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

Research notes

Not started. This ask is about appointments, so we checked the roster of Mandate contributors in office first: of the ten DHS current offices on it, none is in OGC. The nearest is Roman Jankowski as Chief Privacy Officer (2025-03-26), which belongs to the Privacy Office rather than OGC and does not answer this ask.

Searched with the other asks on DHS headquarters reporting lines and management practice. Government-wide Schedule C expansion (EO 14171 and the Schedule Policy/Career rule, tracked at #125) is the general instrument; nothing found ties it to DHS OGC specifically.

Reviewed 2026-09-06. OPM’s published Schedule C appointment data was proposed as a source, at three addresses, all dead: OPM’s Senior Executive Service Schedule C appointments page (not found), its open-government Schedule C data app (unavailable), and opm.gov/data, which opens but is a dashboard index with no Schedule C listing on it. OPM no longer publishes a Schedule C appointment list at all. What replaced FedScope is data.opm.gov, the Federal Workforce Data service, and it answers this question better than a list would:

  • Monthly workforce snapshots back to 2005 (207 of them), with accessions and separations as two further datasets.
  • Each record carries the appointment type, department, agency, agency subelement, occupational series and supervisory status, one row per employee-month, about 2.03 million rows in the June 2026 file. Schedule C is listed as “Schedule C (excepted service nonpermanent)”; the new “Schedule Policy/Career (excepted service permanent)” type is also present and stood at 417 across DHS in June 2026, which is worth knowing for #125.
  • The citable page is the data-downloads page, https://data.opm.gov/get-data/data-downloads, not an individual download link.
Action
appoint
Object
OGC Schedule C/political appointees
ID
428