Place political appointees over OTAQ in Ann Arbor and OAQPS in Research Triangle Park

Research notes

• Roster check: the roster of people the Mandate credits records one EPA current office, Aaron Szabo as Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation — a headquarters post, not a laboratory-city one. Katie Mills is not one of the Mandate’s credited people, so no roster entry is due.
• Corrected 2026-09-06: not started → partial, Reason: error. Two earlier readings rested on a factual premise that is wrong. The 2026-08-27 note and the 2026-09-01 abolished-addressee check both stated that OAQPS’s functions were “dispersed into two differently-named Washington offices”, and the second concluded from that premise that Research Triangle Park was abandoned and the OAQPS limb was defeated rather than unperformed. It was not abandoned. OPM’s PLUM listing gives Durham, NC duty stations for the Director of the Office of Clean Air Programs, the Director and Deputy Director of the Office of State Air Partnerships and the Director of the Impacts and Ambient Standards Division, and EPA’s own OAR page gives every one of those offices a 919 telephone number. The successors are at RTP; the geography the Quote turns on survived.
• With that premise corrected, the rename test — which is asked first, and turns on functions rather than the org chart — answers the OAQPS half: the stationary-source planning and standards work continues at Research Triangle Park under two new names. The test for an ask addressed to an abolished body does not reach an office whose functions continued in place, so the 2026-09-01 reading is withdrawn.
• What then delivers the limb is Katie Mills’s appointment: a noncareer SES Deputy Assistant Administrator for Permitting and Regional Matters, duty-stationed at Durham. The Quote asks for “the requisite titles and authority to oversee the OTAQ and OAQPS staff”, and a deputy assistant administrator for permitting sits above the office directors who now do that work.
• What the PLUM record does and does not establish. It establishes the appointment type (noncareer SES, the standard form of a non-Senate-confirmed political appointment) and the duty station, both reported by EPA itself. It does not establish a reporting line: no EPA document says in terms that the Offices of Clean Air Programs and State Air Partnerships report to this deputy assistant administrator. That gap is why this is partial on one delivered limb rather than an argument for reading the ask as wholly met.
• The Ann Arbor limb is independently unperformed and would be the thing to watch: OTAQ’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory is there, and no EPA policy or supporting position is.