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

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Put a political appointee in charge of the EPA grants office

Not started

444 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“Put a political appointee in charge of the grants office to prioritize distribution of grants to those who are most in need and toward projects that will tangibly improve the environment.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    The grants office is run by a career official, and EPA's own report to OPM says so by omission. OPM's PLUM listing of EPA's policy and supporting positions, as of 15 June 2026, carries no Office of the Chief Grants Officer component and no grants-titled position of any appointment type among EPA's 179 reported posts — so no political appointee, and no career senior executive either, is reported as heading it. EPA's own page for the office names Melissa Wise as Director and BJ Collins as Deputy Director with directors for each of its five divisions. The 2025 reorganization folded OCGO into the new Office of Finance and Administration under a Senate-confirmed Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer, which puts a political appointee two levels above the grants office but does not put one in charge of it. `src/data/people.json` carries no EPA grants post, and no EPA announcement in the window names a political appointee over grants.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • An appointment ask, so the roster of people the Mandate credits was checked first. Its single EPA entry is Aaron Szabo at the Office of Air and Radiation; no grants office appears.
  • The Senate nominations we keep and search (from congress.gov), filtered to EPA: ten EPA confirmations in the window (Zeldin, Fotouhi, Donahue, Szabo, Hanson, Kramer, Busterud, Turner, Hall, Troutman); none is a grants post, which is expected since the job is not Senate-confirmed.
  • One web search restricted to epa.gov for a political appointee over the grants office returned only the DOGE cancellation releases.
  • PLUM listing read 2026-09-06. Status unchanged. The question was who is “whoever heads the Office of the Chief Grants Officer’s political layer”. OPM’s PLUM database under the PLUM Act is the listing that would carry one, and EPA reports none: the whole OCGO component is absent from a listing that does carry every other constituent office of the Office of Finance and Administration. This turns a negative taken from an EPA web page into a negative taken from EPA’s own statutory report of its policy and supporting positions, which is a stronger thing.
  • The same question also asked for a published dollar threshold for grant review; that half belongs to #1197 and is recorded there. The Office of the Chief Grants Officer page and epa.gov/grants (updated 2026-08-27) were both read on this date and neither publishes one.
  • EPA’s full regulatory agenda, read 2026-09-01. The full EPA Unified Agenda was read on reginfo.gov (214 entries across the active, long-term and completed stages), because the Federal Register prints only the entries that need a Regulatory Flexibility analysis and the 2026-08-27 negative search was taken from that abbreviated version. The only grants rulemaking on the whole agenda is RIN 2030-AB05, Revisions to Subtitle B of Title 2 on Federal Financial Assistance (EPA/Office of Mission Support, Proposed Rule Stage, NPRM 07/2026): https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202510&RIN=2030-AB05. It is about indirect cost policy and converting guidance to regulation, not about who leads the grants office — which is an appointment ask a rulemaking would not answer anyway. Status unchanged.
Action
appoint
Object
head of the EPA grants office
ID
1198