The other pages count cabinet seats. But every US administration also hands out thousands of jobs below that: agency deputies, policy chiefs, confidential aides. The Plum Book is the goverment's own list of those positions. The question here is whether the pattern at the very top holds further down. Note: this is still work in progress and below is just initial findings.
The Plum Book records no race, ethnicity, religion or gender. The gender figures here are estimated from appointees' first names, an approximation that can't identify nonbinary people and is less accurate for names outside its reference data. Treat every percentage as rough, not exact. Full method at the bottom of the page.
The Plum Book used to be a printed volume, issued after each presidential election. That's changing. Under the PLUM Act of 2022 the print edition is being retired, and OPM now runs an online system that agencies update through the year. This analysis uses OPM's snapshot dated 15 June 2026. It lists every “policy and supporting position”, which is a mixture of presidential and political appointments together with some senior career and time-limited roles. It is not a straight split between the two.
These are currently filled positions, and they add up to 6,027 of the 6,846 filled. Another 819 filled positions carry no appointment-type code in the data, and 2,951 positions are vacant, about 30% of the 9,797 current ones. (The file also holds 5,980 records of departed incumbents, which are left out of every figure here.) By common estimates a president fills roughly 4,000 political jobs in total, including more than 1,200 that need Senate confirmation, which is broadly in line with the filled-plus-vacant totals.
Across roughly 2,900 currently filled presidential and political posts (Senate-confirmed, presidential and Schedule C), about a third are held by women, close to the ratio in the current cabinet. The balance is not even across ranks, though. The more senior the tier, the fewer women in it.
The overall figure hides a lot of variation. Education and Health & Human Services come closest to an even split among their political staff, while Justice, Commerce, Homeland Security and Defense are the most male. Shown are twelve departments with enough filled presidential/political posts to be worth comparing.
These numbers come from a single data file, run through one imperfect method. Here's what was done, and where it falls down.
OPM's PLUM Reporting data, the online successor to the printed Plum Book, dated 15 June 2026. It holds 15,777 incumbent records covering 9,797 current positions, since the file also logs earlier officeholders. Every figure here counts only current incumbents, meaning those with no recorded departure date. Departed incumbents are left out.
The gender charts use only clearly presidential and political posts: Senate-confirmed (PAS), presidential without confirmation (PA), and Schedule C. The vaguer categories that aren't necessarily the president's to choose, such as excepted-by-statute and limited-term roles, are left out, as are career appointments. Gender itself is inferred from first names (about 94% resolved), so it's an estimate rather than a count.
Name-based inference cannot see nonbinary people, and it resolves Anglo names more reliably than others. Because that unreliability tracks ethnicity, the residual error is not random, which is a reason to read these figures as rough rather than precise.
The Plum data hold no race, ethnicity, or religion, so those dimensions can't be told from this file at all. And it is one snapshot: it describes the current roster, not how any of this has changed over time.