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Workforce
The overall number of federal employees has also increased slightly in the past four years, according to OPM data — from 2,097,038 in September 2016
to 2,181,106 in September 2020.
2020
2016
It lists jobs in the executive and legisla- tive branches that do and don’t require Senate confirmation, positions that can be filled by non-career members of the Senior Executive Service (SES) and Schedule C employees, and other con- fidential or policy-determining positions at the GS-14 level and above that are exempt from the competitive service by law.
The version released in early Janu- ary contains information from June 2020, as reported to the Office of Personnel Management by agencies and offices. It provides some details, though not a full picture, of senior-level positions in the last year of the Trump administration.
There hasn’t been significant varia- tion in the overall number of Senate- confirmed appointees at large agencies since 2000, said Christina Condreay, an associate manager on the Partnership for Public Service’s research and evaluation team. However, there has been a steady increase. In the 2000 Plum Book, there were 766 positions requiring Senate con- firmation, compared to 818 in 2016 and 826 in 2020.
The overall number of federal employ- ees has also increased slightly in the past four years, according to OPM data — from 2,097,038 in September 2016 to 2,181,106 in September 2020.
Those increases are in sharp con- trast to Trump administration officials’ claims that they would shrink the gov- ernment workforce, including political- ly appointed positions. In 2016, White House spokesman Cliff Sims said: “The number of political appointees will drop significantly. ‘Drain the swamp’ was not just a campaign slogan.”
The hazards of incomplete data
The book is essentially a snapshot of government positions taken right before an administration heads out the door, so it can be difficult to use it to draw conclusions about how many appoint- ed positions there were over the past four years, said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service.
That analysis is further complicated by the fact that the book’s data is incom- plete. For example, not all Senate-con- firmed positions have made it into recent versions of the book, said David Lewis, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University whose focus of study is the presidency, executive branch politics and public administration.
Although it’s often thought of as an anthology of political appointments, the Plum Book also includes career positions for SES members and Senior
Foreign Service Officers. Condreay said the book’s appendices often reference the number of positions listed, but this year’s appendices don’t include the totals for at least seven offices and agencies in the book, including the U.S. Postal Service and the Office of the Inspec- tor General for the U.S. International Trade Commission. In addition, vacant SES positions are usually included in the “general” category for the total count but weren’t this year.
Furthermore, the 2020 book has no information on positions at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors), the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other government entities.
For those and other reasons, some lawmakers pushed to make the Plum Book into an online, continually updated resource last year, but their bill didn’t make it all the way through Congress.
Efforts to evade Senate confirmation
According to the foreword, the book lists over 9,000 positions, but the num- ber the Biden administration will need to fill is probably 3,800 to 4,000, Con- dreay said. That is similar to the num-
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