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

20. Department of Veterans Affairs · Major · Day one

Transfer career SES out of PA/PAS-designated VA positions on day one

Not started

651 20. Department of Veterans Affairs

“Transfer all career SES out of PA/PAS-designated positions on the first day and ensure political control of the VA.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No allowlisted source documents VA moving career Senior Executive Service members out of positions designated for presidential appointment, on day one or since. The government-wide instruments that come closest do not reach this ask: the Presidential Memorandum of 2025-01-20, "Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives", tells every agency head to reassign SES members so their "mission assignments are optimally aligned" with the President's agenda and to reconstitute Executive Resources and Performance Review Boards, but it names no agency and says nothing about PA/PAS-designated positions. VA's own PAS vacancies were filled the ordinary way, by nomination and confirmation, through 2025 and 2026.

Research log

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

Research notes

Queries and sources, 2026-08-27:

  • Corpus fr-presdocu.ndjson and presidential-actions.ndjson, grep -i 'senior executive' — one instrument, the 2025-01-20 memorandum cited above, read in full on govinfo.gov (FR-2025-01-30/html/2025-02042.htm).
  • Corpus fr-notice.ndjson, VA notices matching organiz|Office of|Functional Statement| delegation — five information-collection notices, nothing on senior executive assignments.
  • Corpus nominations.ndjson, VA nominations: the Secretary, Deputy Secretary, General Counsel, CFO, Under Secretary for Memorial Affairs, Under Secretary for Health, Inspector General and the Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Legislative Affairs were all confirmed between 2025-02-04 and 2025-12-18, several others withdrawn or still pending. That is evidence about filling PAS posts, not about where career SES were moved, so it is a lead only.
  • WebSearch: “Veterans Affairs career Senior Executive Service reassigned out of presidentially appointed positions 2025 Collins” (allowed domains va.gov, opm.gov, gao.gov, govexec.com, federalnewsnetwork.com) returned only government-wide SES material — OPM’s memoranda “Maintaining the Integrity of the Career Senior Executive Service” (2025-02-05) and “Guidance on Career Reserved Senior Executive Service Positions and Agency Redesignation Requests”, plus Federal News Network’s April 2026 report of a near-30-percent fall in the career SES. None of these is VA-specific or PA/PAS-specific; they are recorded here as leads.
  • This is the weakest evidentiary position of the eleven items in this batch: the ask concerns internal personnel movements that leave no Federal Register or court trace. It may be a candidate for unverified if a non-allowlisted account of the day-one transfers surfaces.
Action
transfer
Object
Career SES personnel in PA/PAS-designated VA positions
ID
1798