Summary

  • OPM's July 9, 2025 PLUM Reporting data listed 10,540 senior positions at 171 federal entities. GAO found at least seven entities absent and at least 130 presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation missing from at least 13 entities. The 130 refers to positions, not named people.
  • Identifiers meant to follow an official across positions were inconsistent between records and site views. Some acting officials were absent from the dated website snapshot; acting-official data and unique IDs displayed on the site were missing from the downloadable file.
  • GAO made seven recommendations and OPM agreed. All seven were still marked open on GAO's official page at the November 4, 2026 research check. The next test is whether a reader can reconcile a post, its occupant or vacancy, and the same person's history across the public site and download.

A full-looking register with missing offices

The GAO's February 2026 report on PLUM Reporting audits a public map of federal power. The 2022 PLUM Act directed the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, OPM, to publish a searchable, sortable and downloadable roster of senior political and career positions. It includes filled and vacant posts, acting officials and officials performing the duties of a vacant office. The site launched in December 2023 to replace a printed Plum Book that could age between editions.

OPM's July 9, 2025 release showed 10,540 positions across 171 entities. Those numbers are the size of the published roster, not a certificate of completeness. GAO checked other official sources and found at least seven federal entities absent. It estimated at least 130 presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation, known as PAS positions, missing from at least 13 entities. A position is an office in the list; the finding does not mean 130 named officeholders vanished or that 130 seats were vacant. GAO's count is a lower bound, so dividing it by 10,540 would manufacture an omission rate.

The omissions matter because the register is supposed to answer a civic question before anyone knows a particular name. Which offices wield authority, which are vacant, who is acting, and who moved through them? GAO identified missing entities including the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board. Among organizations whose information OPM collected by email outside its usual submission system, the Smithsonian Institution, Delaware River Basin Commission and Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation were also absent from the 2025 data.

These are examples of different collection gaps, not five of one tidy seven-item list.

The person moves; the identifier does not follow

Completeness is only the first join. The PLUM Act requires a unique identifier for each appointee so a reader can follow a person's path through senior roles. GAO found identifiers applied inconsistently. An individual's number could differ between the main PLUM Data page and the historical-record view. People holding multiple positions simultaneously sometimes appeared with different identifiers for each. Some positions were duplicated, and entity names were labelled inconsistently. When the same person acquires a new number at the next screen, the public record treats a career as disconnected entries.

The site and its downloadable data disagreed as well. Information on acting officials or officials performing the duties of a vacant office, and the unique identifiers shown on the site, did not all travel into the downloadable file. A researcher using the web page and one using the official download could therefore reach different descriptions of the same chain of authority. In its July 2025 snapshot, the site failed to identify the Acting Administrator of the General Services Administration and Acting Director of the U.S. Mint even though those roles appeared on the agencies' own sites and in GAO's vacancies database.

That is a dated comparison, not a statement about who holds either job today.

OPM had quality procedures. It provided written guidance, trained agency data submitters monthly, encouraged reviews and ran a help desk. The agency said individual entities controlled their own personnel records and used different systems, while OPM could not automatically see real-time changes in all those systems. Some entities sent data by email because they lacked direct access to OPM's Executive and Schedule C System. OPM also said it lacked a process and resources to identify every covered entity or office. The control gap is therefore not a blank policy manual.

It is the absence of a reliable reconciliation between agencies' self-reported entries and the public universe of offices the law says should appear.

Seven open repairs for a public map

The GAO recommendation record still marked seven items open when checked on November 4, 2026. GAO asked OPM to find omitted reportable positions; keep one person-specific ID stable; automate more validation; put acting-official information and those IDs into the download; engage users; and prominently explain known data limits. OPM concurred and described work under way or planned. An open recommendation does not establish that no work has begun; it establishes that GAO has not recorded closure.

The practical receipt is a public position found by searching, sorting and downloading, with the same vacancy or acting status in each view and the same identifier following the same person through the site's history. A cross-check against other official lists should reveal fewer missing posts and a documented route for correcting an omission. Until then, the impressive count at the top of the page is only the count of what made it onto the page. The difficult information is what the page fails to name.

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