Staff ITA Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary posts from Day One

Research notes

Leveled on the Senate confirmation record in nominations.ndjson, which is the only allowlisted, dated source for these posts. The sequence is the finding: ITA’s Under Secretary seat was empty for six months, one Assistant Secretary nomination (David Rader) was withdrawn on 2025-07-17, and the seat that replaced it took until 2026-05-18. partial, not done, because the Quote’s operative words are “from Day One” and “as quickly as possible”, and because the Deputy Assistant Secretary layer the Quote also names is filled without Senate action and is not published.

The roster (src/data/people.json) was checked first, as plan.md mechanic 5 requires: it carries one Commerce Current office, Robby Stephany Saunders as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology Security at BIS (2025-09-17), which is not an ITA post.

Correction, 2026-09-01, ticket 26 phase 2, batch defects. Status held at partial. The 2026-05-18 note closed on “Deputy Assistant Secretary appointments are not published”, which is false as a general claim and was flagged by the appointments audit: the roster’s own Commerce entry is dated from a Federal Register signature block, approximate: true, at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-09-17/html/2025-18015.htm. The same instrument works for ITA, and this pass ran it. Two searches, both 2026-09-01:

• Federal Register API, agencies=international-trade-administration, published on or after 2025-01-20, full text "Deputy Assistant Secretary" — 1,552 documents. ITA’s deputy assistant secretaries are named in the Federal Register almost daily, in the signature blocks of the bureau’s antidumping and countervailing-duty notices. Two read in full via govinfo (the federalregister.gov document pages 302-redirect automated fetches; the API does not): https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-08-21/html/2026-17050.htm, signed “Christopher Abbott, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Negotiations, performing the non-exclusive functions and duties of the Assistant Secretary for Enforcement and Compliance”; and https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-09-01/html/2026-17811.htm, signed “Scot Fullerton, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Operations”.
• Same API, same agency and window, notices whose full text carries "Delegation of Authority" → 0; "Appointment of" → 0. So no ITA designation instrument is in the Federal Register, which is the route that could have carried this item to done and does not exist.

Net effect on the rung: none, and the reason is worth stating because it is not the one the audit expected. Even a fully staffed DAS layer would not close this ask, because the Quote’s operative words are “from Day One” and “as quickly as possible” and the sequence recorded above — an empty Under Secretary seat for six months, a withdrawn Assistant Secretary nomination, a returned nomination, the last Assistant Secretary confirmed at sixteen months — fails that limb on the record. What the search does change is the note: the negative is now the narrow, true one (no designation instrument in the FR) rather than the broad, false one (appointments not published), per §3b’s rule that a negative search must say how far it reaches. And the signature blocks add a fact that runs the item’s own way: nineteen months in, one of ITA’s two visible DAS posts is still signed for in an acting capacity.

Read-queue ticket 07, 2026-09-06. The row asked for ITA’s own leadership or organization pages, which the 2026-09-01 pass had reached only through Federal Register signature blocks. They exist and they open on the bare curl rung: trade.gov/ita-senior-staff for the bureau and trade.gov/enforcement-compliance-about-us for the unit, both found by grepping trade.gov/sitemap.xml (five children, 13,201 URLs — the row’s “no sitemap route found” is wrong). The roster confirms and extends the signature-block reading: Scot Fullerton is still Acting for AD/CVD Operations, and Christopher Abbott has moved up from Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Negotiations to performing the Assistant Secretary’s duties, with Steven Presing now Acting in the seat Abbott left. Under the playbook’s rule for undated agency directories the pages are Evidence of a state, dated at the observation, and the negative they carry is a strong one: the page lists offices with a name against each, so “Vacant” and “Acting” are the roster’s own words, not an absence.