17. Department of Justice · Minor
Vastly expand the number of political appointees across DOJ
Printed page 569 17. Department of Justice
“Ensure the assignment of sufficient political appointees throughout the department. … The next conservative Administration must make every effort to obtain the resources to support a vast expansion of the number of appointees in every office and component across the department—especially in the Civil Rights Division, the FBI, and the EOIR.”
What has happened
- Not started
No expansion of the department's political appointee complement has been published. Searched the Federal Register Corpus for every Justice Department rule, proposed rule and notice in the window, the whitehouse.gov presidential-actions Corpus, the congress.gov bills and nominations Corpus, and all 2,087 headquarters press releases fetched from the department's own press API for the window. Nothing records new appointee positions in the Civil Rights Division, the FBI or EOIR, the three components the Quote singles out, and no budget or reprogramming request for them appears on the record. The department's published staffing news for those components is career hiring — 153 immigration judges in fiscal 2026 — not appointees. **How far the negative reaches, added 2026-09-05:** the FY 2027 Congressional Budget Submission was read for this ask and cannot answer it — the justifications count positions, attorneys and FTE by decision unit and the words "political appointee", "Schedule C" and "noncareer" appear nowhere in the Justice Operations, Management and Accountability, U.S. Attorneys or Office of Justice Programs volumes. This is a negative about the department's published budget and press record; the appointee complement itself is not a thing DOJ publishes.
No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
This is an ask to appoint people. Our roster of the Mandate’s credited people records no current office matching this wording. One negative search covered the whole cluster of management and organization asks, #1579, #1580, #1584, #1585 and #1587.
- The budget pages had moved, not gone (reviewed 2026-09-05). This item had been held open on justice.gov/jmd/budget-and-performance, which no longer exists. The live page is https://www.justice.gov/doj/budget-and-performance, and the FY 2027 volumes read cleanly. They do not settle appointee counts: no volume breaks positions out by appointment type. The reason for holding the item open was wrong, not just its address — the DOJ budget was never going to answer this ask.
- What the FY 2027 submission does contain, and which cuts the other way, is a reorganization reducing the number of separately-led components: COPS, OJP and OVW are to be consolidated into a single Bureau of Justice Grants under one Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorney General (https://www.justice.gov/jmd/media/1434626/dl?inline). It is a lead rather than Evidence because it is about component heads rather than about the appointee complement the Quote asks to expand, and because no appointee count moves with it on the record.
- Action
- appoint
- Object
- political appointees throughout the DOJ
- ID
- 1579