The Fourth Unelected Branch

The civics-textbook description of American government identifies three branches: the legislative branch that writes the laws, the executive branch that enforces them, and the judicial branch that interprets them. Each branch is constituted by election or by elected appointment. Each branch can be removed by election, by impeachment, or by appointment of successors. The civics-textbook description is accurate as far as it goes. It is incomplete.

There exists a fourth functional branch of American government. It is not described in the Constitution. It is not constituted by election. It is not removed by election. It exercises continuous operational authority across administrations, drafts the policy language that elected officials enact, manages the classified appropriations that fund roughly eighty percent of the intelligence community's spending, and operates a recruitment system that brings rising professionals into its network at age thirty and retains their affiliation for life. It has its own membership rolls, its own internal hierarchy, its own publication of record, and its own physical headquarters in a Manhattan brownstone purchased in 1945.

This fourth branch is not a secret. Its activities are conducted in plain view. Its membership rolls have been published, on three separate occasions during the past decade, as annual reports on its own website. Its policy outputs appear in the Foreign Affairs journal and in Senate testimony and in the Federal Register. Its operatives have been written about extensively, in many cases by themselves. What has not been done, until now, is the inventory work: the systematic assembly of who is in this branch, where they sit in the federal government at any given moment, how they entered the network, and what primary-source documentation supports the claim that they belong to it.

This Handbook is that inventory.

Why "fourth branch" rather than "deep state"

The terms "deep state" and "shadow government" have entered American political discourse in the past decade, and both have something to recommend them. They describe the same observation that this Handbook describes: that the personnel who actually run the federal government from one administration to the next are largely the same personnel, and that this layer of continuity exercises influence that is not captured by the standard three-branch model. The terms are descriptively pointed.

The terms also carry connotations of secrecy and conspiracy that this Handbook explicitly does not endorse. Nothing documented here is secret. Every name in the roster appears in public records. Every classification is supported by primary-source citations available on the open internet. The CFR's annual reports are hosted on static.cfr.org. The Senior Executive Service was created by an Act of Congress signed by President Carter on October 13, 1978, and its operational mechanics are described in the United States Code at Title 5, Chapter 31. The names of senior career executives appear in agency directories, congressional testimony, news coverage, and ethics disclosures. None of this is hidden.

"Fourth unelected branch" is the correct framing precisely because nothing here is secret. The architecture documented in this Handbook operates publicly. It is a branch of government in the functional sense: continuous, institutionally identifiable, possessing its own personnel system, exercising significant policy authority, and surviving administrations. It is unelected in the constitutional sense: no member of it is chosen by voters, and no member can be removed by voters except indirectly through the political-appointee layer above it. The civics-textbook omission is not that this branch exists in shadow. The omission is that students are not taught to count it.

The two architectures that constitute this branch

This Handbook documents two interlocking institutional architectures and the personnel who occupy the space where they overlap.

The first architecture is the Senior Executive Service, established by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. The SES is the senior managerial layer of the federal government — the roughly five to seven thousand career executives who sit between the Senate-confirmed political appointee class above and the General Schedule civil service below. SES executives run program offices, manage agency divisions, draft regulations, control classified appropriations, and operate the day-to-day machinery of departments that political appointees nominally lead. By design, SES executives are rotational: they move across agencies, between policy and operational roles, and into and out of government via consulting firms and think tanks. By design, they outlast administrations. The SES was created to provide continuity. It continues to provide it.

The second architecture is the Council on Foreign Relations, founded in 1921 and headquartered since 1945 at the Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street in New York. The CFR is a private membership organization with approximately five thousand four hundred life members and a separate cohort of approximately two hundred new term members elected each year. It publishes Foreign Affairs, the journal of record for American foreign policy discussion. It convenes Independent Task Forces that issue policy recommendations on subjects ranging from China to climate change to economic security. It runs fellowship programs that rotate professionals between CFR and the federal government. It conducts a Term Member Program established in 1971 that brings professionals ages thirty to thirty-six into the network for a five-year elected membership, after which most are invited to apply for life membership.

Neither architecture, considered alone, constitutes a branch of government. The SES is a personnel system; the CFR is a private membership organization. What this Handbook documents is the systematic overlap between them: the degree to which senior SES executives, and the political appointees above them, are also members of the CFR; the degree to which CFR policy outputs become United States policy through senior personnel who occupy both institutions; and the degree to which the recruitment mechanism by which CFR cultivates rising professionals at age thirty produces the same individuals who occupy senior federal positions at age fifty.

The overlap is not incidental. It is the institutional design.

What this Handbook documents

Approximately two hundred thirty named individuals across twelve agency clusters. The Department of State (with particular attention to the Policy Planning Staff, where nineteen of the most recent twenty directors have CFR or lattice affiliations). The Department of the Treasury (with attention to the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — the sanctions and financial-intelligence apparatus that the first Under Secretary of TFI, Stuart Levey, built between 2004 and 2011). The Department of Defense, with attention to the consulting triangle of the Center for a New American Security, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and WestExec Advisors. The intelligence community senior layer at CIA, NSA, NGA, NRO, DIA, and ODNI. The Department of Health and Human Services, with particular attention to the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. The Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration. The Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The National Security Council. The Department of Commerce and the Bureau of Industry and Security. The major consulting firms that constitute the post-government landing-pad system. The subnational political layer of governors, attorneys general, secretaries of state, and mayors with documented CFR engagement.

Every named individual receives a classification tier. The tiers form a hierarchy of evidentiary strength. At the top is CFR-Member, with three sub-classifications: Life Membership (the standard tier, confirmed via appearance in the FY2016, FY17, or FY18 Membership Roster PDFs); Term Membership (the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program five-year cohort, anchored to the dagger marker in those same PDFs); and Board of Directors (the strongest classification, reserved for current CFR Board members). Below CFR-Member is CFR-Fellow, identifying current or former fellowship recipients and Senior or Distinguished Fellow appointees. Below that is CFR-Adjacent, identifying individuals with extensive CFR engagement (speaking history, Foreign Affairs publications, event participation) but without primary-source documentation of member-tier status. Below that is CFR-Wikipedia-Listed, identifying individuals who appear on secondary-source compilation pages without independent CFR primary-source corroboration. Outside the CFR tier system are Lattice and Consulting-Firm classifications for individuals documented at institutional positions of consequence (career Senior Executive Service, partner at a major consulting firm) without identifiable CFR affiliation.

Every classification carries its primary-source citation. The transparency move is structural to the Handbook: every CFR-Member claim is anchored to either a static.cfr.org PDF page reference or a cfr.org URL. A researcher who wishes to challenge a specific classification can verify the underlying source in seconds. A researcher who wishes to extend the work has a verified starting point.

What this Handbook does not claim

This Handbook does not claim that every senior federal official is a CFR member. The roster covers approximately two hundred thirty named individuals. The federal workforce contains roughly two million civilian employees. The Senior Executive Service alone contains between five thousand and eight thousand executives at any given moment. The Handbook documents a specific architecture at the senior policy layer, not a comprehensive personnel inventory.

This Handbook does not claim that CFR membership constitutes a conspiracy. The CFR is a legal nonprofit organization. Its activities are public. Its membership rolls are published. Its policy recommendations appear in named-author articles in a journal anyone can subscribe to. Nothing about the institution requires secrecy or implies criminal coordination. What the Handbook documents is institutional pattern, not criminal conspiracy.

This Handbook does not claim partisan exclusivity. The roster includes individuals who served under President Obama, President Trump's first administration, President Biden, and President Trump's second administration. The CFR's membership and Task Force participation span the Democratic and Republican coalitions in roughly equivalent proportions, because both coalitions draw senior personnel from the same recruitment pipeline.

This Handbook does not allege misconduct against any named individual. Inclusion in the roster reflects institutional affiliation documented in primary sources. Where an individual's classification has been downgraded to CFR-Adjacent or CFR-Wikipedia-Listed, this reflects insufficiency of primary-source documentation to support the higher classification, not adverse judgment about the individual.

How to use this Handbook

The Handbook is organized in four Parts. Part One (Sections I through V) establishes the architectural framework: the SES, the CFR cultivation system, and the five-stage pipeline that turns CFR consensus into Federal Register implementation. Read Part One in sequence; the framework supports the inventory work that follows.

Part Two (Sections VI through XI) is the inventory itself. Each section corresponds to an agency cluster or institutional layer. Within each section, individuals are presented as cards bearing their name, role, tenure, classification tier badge, contextual paragraph, and primary-source citation. Filter controls at the top of each section allow filtering by tier, administration, and other dimensions. Researchers may read Part Two by section or by filter view; both work.

Part Three (Sections XII and XIII) is the current operational state. Section XII documents the Trump second-administration contest with the SES, including the Schedule Policy/Career reclassification effort, the AFGE litigation tracker, and the SES headcount metrics. Section XIII presents a live case study: the November 2025 CFR Independent Task Force on U.S. Economic Security, co-chaired by Gina Raimondo, Justin Muzinich, and James Taiclet, all three of whom are primary-source-confirmed CFR members, and whose policy recommendations are now visible in Commerce, Treasury, and Defense Department frameworks.

Part Four (Sections XIV through XVI) is the reference layer: fifteen Pattern Observations developed across eight verification rounds; the primary-source URL universe with verification protocols; and the full classification system and acronym glossary.

The Handbook is designed to be entered at any point. A researcher investigating Treasury sanctions personnel will find what is needed in Section VII without reading the prior six sections. A researcher seeking to verify the methodology will find what is needed in Section II and Section XV. A researcher seeking the analytical framework will find it in Part One. The structure permits both linear reading and reference use.

A note on the relationship to the Before the Handshake trilogy

This Handbook is a companion volume to the three-part series Before the Handshake, also available at ToreSays.com. Part I of the trilogy documents the publication cadence by which CFR-affiliated authors prepared policy ground in Foreign Affairs before the November 2025 Trump-Xi summit. Part II documents the institutional history of the Pratt House from the Inquiry of 1917 through the present. Part III documents the five-stage policy pipeline from Pratt House meetings through Foreign Affairs publication, Senate testimony, statutory language, and Federal Register implementation, with three case studies including the Raimondo-Muzinich-Taiclet Task Force.

The trilogy establishes the policy-output side of the architecture: what the fourth branch produces and how the production process works. This Handbook documents the personnel-input side: who occupies the positions, how they entered the network, and what primary-source documentation supports the institutional affiliations. The trilogy and the Handbook are designed to be read together; each illuminates what the other documents.

What follows in Section II is the methodology — the explanation of how every claim in the Handbook is sourced, how the classification tiers are defined, and what URL or PDF page reference supports any given classification. Researchers and journalists who intend to use the Handbook to verify, challenge, or extend the work should read Section II carefully. Every name that follows is built on the verification structure that Section II describes.

The defensibility of this Handbook rests on a single methodological commitment: every claim of CFR membership or fellowship is anchored to a primary-source URL or PDF page reference that a reader can verify independently in the time it takes to open a browser tab. This section describes the verification universe, the classification tiers, and the protocols by which the Handbook decides what an individual's classification should be.

The three-roster universe

The Council on Foreign Relations published complete annual membership rosters as part of its annual reports through fiscal year 2018. After fiscal year 2018, the comprehensive roster section was discontinued from the publicly available annual report. The current cfr.org/membership/roster page presents a partial, alphabetical listing of members but is not a downloadable comprehensive document. The complete public roster universe accessible to researchers consists of three PDFs:

These three PDFs are hosted on the static.cfr.org and www.cfr.org subdomains controlled by the Council on Foreign Relations itself. They are not third-party leaks, reconstructions, or compilations. They are the institution's own published documents. Researchers who wish to verify any CFR-Member classification in this Handbook for any individual whose membership is documented prior to mid-2018 will find the verification in one of these three PDFs.

The PDFs use a consistent notation system. An asterisk after a name (for example, Youngkin, Glenn Allen*) indicates election to membership in the year the roster covers. The FY17 PDF legend states explicitly: "* Elected to membership in 2017." A dagger after a name (for example, Chorev, Matan†) indicates election to a five-year term membership in the year the roster covers. The FY18 PDF legend states explicitly: "† Elected to a five-year term membership in 2018." Both markers, applied to names within the alphabetical roster, allow a researcher to identify not only that an individual was a CFR member as of the roster's date, but the specific year of election and the specific tier of membership entered.

Post-2018 verification protocol

For individuals whose CFR affiliation began after July 1, 2018, or for whom the roster PDF appearance is uncertain, this Handbook relies on a second tier of primary sources: pages hosted on the cfr.org domain that explicitly use member-tier language. The verification protocol is strict.

Acceptable post-2018 primary sources include the current CFR Board of Directors page (cfr.org/board-directors), CFR press releases announcing new Board members or distinguished fellows (cfr.org/news-releases/…), CFR expert biography pages that use the phrase "Member of the Council on Foreign Relations" or "Senior Fellow" or equivalent tier language (cfr.org/experts/… or cfr.org/bios/…), and CFR event transcripts in which a participant is explicitly labeled with primary-tier language. Acceptable does not mean sufficient on its own; in practice, the strongest classifications combine roster PDF evidence with current CFR.org page evidence.

The protocol explicitly excludes several common forms of evidence that researchers might be tempted to treat as primary. Speaking history at CFR events does not establish membership; CFR routinely hosts non-member speakers. Foreign Affairs authorship does not establish membership; the journal regularly publishes non-member authors. Mention on a Wikipedia compilation page does not establish membership; Wikipedia compilations are secondary sources that themselves require primary verification. "Deep institutional record" — the colloquial sense that someone is widely understood to be CFR-affiliated — does not establish membership; the Handbook's verification standard requires identification, not reputation. Where these forms of evidence are present without primary-source corroboration, the individual is classified at the appropriate sub-member tier (CFR-Adjacent, CFR-Wikipedia-Listed) rather than CFR-Member.

Classification tiers

The Handbook uses seven classification categories, organized as a hierarchy of evidentiary strength.

CFR-Member · Life. Full Life Membership confirmed via appearance in the FY2016, FY17, or FY18 Membership Roster PDF (without a dagger), or via a post-2018 CFR primary source identifying the individual as a Life Member. This is the standard CFR-Member classification and represents the largest body of membership.

CFR-Member · Term (Kellen Program). Five-year term membership in the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program. Anchored to a dagger marker in the FY2016, FY17, or FY18 PDF, or to a post-2018 CFR primary source identifying the individual as a Kellen Term Member. The Kellen Program is CFR's primary recruitment mechanism for professionals ages thirty to thirty-six; Section IV documents its operation in detail.

CFR-Member · Board of Directors. Current member of the CFR Board of Directors. The strongest classification in the Handbook, institutionally above ordinary membership. Anchored to the current CFR Board page at cfr.org/board-directors. As of the date of this Handbook, the Board includes Thomas E. Donilon, Christopher P. Liddell, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and approximately thirty additional members, chaired by David M. Rubenstein with Robert E. Rubin as Chairman Emeritus.

CFR-Fellow. Current or former fellowship recipient (International Affairs Fellowship, Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship, Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowship, Robert A. Belfer IAF in European Security, IAF in Japan, Technologist-in-Residence Fellowship) or current Senior Fellow or Distinguished Fellow at the David Rockefeller Studies Program. Anchored to a CFR.org expert bio, fellowship announcement, or event transcript using fellow-tier language. Where the specific program is documented, the program is noted in the individual's card.

CFR-Adjacent. Extensive CFR engagement — multiple event appearances, Foreign Affairs publications, Task Force participation, Term Member Conference appearances — without primary-source documentation identifying the individual at member tier or above. The CFR-Adjacent classification is the appropriate tier for individuals whose CFR involvement is publicly substantial but whose specific membership status cannot be confirmed by the verification protocol.

CFR-Wikipedia-Listed. Appearance on the Wikipedia "Members of the Council on Foreign Relations" compilation page or equivalent secondary-source listings, without corroboration from CFR primary sources. The classification reflects the secondary documentation honestly while marking the absence of primary-source verification.

Lattice / Consulting-Firm / Career-SES. Documented position within the institutional lattice that the Handbook tracks — Senior Executive Service career executive, partner or senior advisor at a major consulting firm (Albright Stonebridge, WestExec, Beacon Global Strategies, Pine Island Capital, BlackRock Investment Institute), think-tank senior fellow at a non-CFR institution (CNAS, CSIS, Brookings, RAND) — without identifiable CFR-tier classification. Inclusion in the Handbook reflects institutional position relevant to the personnel architecture; absence of CFR classification reflects the verification standard applied honestly.

Eight verification rounds

The roster underlying this Handbook was assembled through eight successive rounds of cross-reference and verification. Round One established the initial roster across nine agency clusters. Round Two integrated user-supplied additions and corrections. Round Three added the subnational political overlay (governors, attorneys general, mayors). Round Three-bis introduced the CFR-Wikipedia-Listed intermediate tier after the discovery that several Wikipedia-only listings could not be corroborated by CFR primary sources. Round Four was the FY17 PDF authentication, in which the full FY17 Membership Roster was fetched and read in alphabetical order, producing primary-source confirmation for James Taiclet, Justin Muzinich, Glenn Youngkin (elected 2017), and Patrick M. Byrne, among others. Round Five was the FY18 PDF authentication and the discovery of Linda Thomas-Greenfield's appointment to the CFR Board of Directors. Round Six was the FY2016 PDF authentication, producing the complete three-roster universe and the methodological lock-in that the public CFR roster universe consists of exactly these three PDFs. Round Seven was the Stuart Levey CFR-Fellow primary-source lock-in via a March 25, 2025 CFR podcast transcript and the application of the methodology footnote. Round Eight integrated the four-track CFR cultivation architecture (fellowship programs, Kellen Term Member Program, Life Membership, Senior and Distinguished Fellowships) and added Pattern Fifteen on the Kellen Program as the primary recruitment mechanism.

Where this Handbook makes a CFR-Member classification, that classification has survived all eight rounds. Where this Handbook makes a CFR-Adjacent or CFR-Wikipedia-Listed classification, that classification represents the considered judgment after multiple verification attempts that the primary-source standard for higher classification was not met.

What this Handbook does not access

The verification universe is restricted to publicly available primary sources. The Handbook does not access internal CFR documents, member directories beyond what is published in annual reports, personnel files at federal agencies, ethics disclosures held in confidence, leaked materials of any kind, or non-public databases. Every source used in this Handbook is available on the open internet to any researcher with a browser.

This restriction is methodological rather than incidental. The Handbook is designed to be reproducible. A second researcher beginning from the same publicly available sources should reach the same classifications. A reader who disagrees with a specific classification should be able to consult the cited primary source and form an independent judgment. The transparency move is structural to the work.

What the Handbook offers in exchange for the restriction is defensibility. Every claim can be challenged, every source can be checked, and every revision can be made on the same primary-source basis. The Pattern Observations in Section XIV are analytical extensions of the verified data; they too are open to challenge on the basis of the same sources.

The Senior Executive Service was created by an Act of Congress in 1978. It is the senior managerial layer of the federal government — the rotating, mobile, durable cohort of approximately five to eight thousand career executives who manage program offices, draft regulations, control classified appropriations, and outlast administrations by design. Understanding what the SES is, statutorily and operationally, is the precondition for understanding how the personnel architecture documented in this Handbook actually functions.

The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act

The Senior Executive Service was created by the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 — Public Law 95-454 — signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on October 13, 1978. The legislation emerged from the Carter administration's Personnel Management Project, an internal reform effort led by Alan "Scotty" Campbell, who at the time chaired the United States Civil Service Commission and subsequently became the first Director of the Office of Personnel Management.

Campbell's vision for the SES was articulated in a 1988 essay reflecting on the program's first decade. The phrasing has since become emblematic of the SES's operational theory. Campbell wrote that the federal government must be able to continue operating "no matter who was in office" — that the rotation of political appointees at the cabinet and sub-cabinet level must not be permitted to disrupt the underlying operational continuity of federal agencies. The SES was designed precisely to provide that continuity. A new president brings new political appointees; the SES underneath them does not change.

The CSRA placed the SES at a specific structural position within the federal personnel system. Above the SES are the Senate-confirmed political appointees: Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, under secretaries, and assistant secretaries. Below the SES are the General Schedule grades GS-1 through GS-15 — the standard civil service. SES positions roughly correspond to the former GS-16 through GS-18 levels plus the executive-schedule levels EX-IV and EX-V that preceded them, but operate under a separate pay and management framework.

Pay structure

SES pay operates outside the General Schedule. As of fiscal year 2026, the structure is:

• Minimum SES base pay: approximately $147,649 per year (the ES-1 equivalent floor)
• Maximum SES base pay: approximately $221,900 per year, tied to Executive Schedule Level II, equal to the Vice President's salary minus one percent
• Maximum with certified performance appraisal system: approximately $246,400 per year, equal to Executive Schedule Level I, equal to the Vice President's salary
• Performance bonuses: up to 20 percent of base salary annually
• Presidential Rank Awards: Meritorious Executive Award (bonus of approximately $35,000 or more) and Distinguished Executive Award (bonus of approximately $70,000 or more)

In practice, senior SES executives at agencies with certified performance appraisal systems — including Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, the National Nuclear Security Administration's top-tier roles, and senior positions across the intelligence community — routinely earn total compensation of two hundred fifty thousand to three hundred thousand dollars or more when bonuses and rank awards are included. This is competitive with senior private-sector positions in law, consulting, and finance, which is the explicit design rationale: the SES pay structure is set to retain technical expertise inside government rather than losing it permanently to consulting firms and corporate sectors.

Career Reserved versus General SES

The SES has two principal classifications. The distinction is statutory and consequential.

Career Reserved SES positions, established under 5 U.S.C. § 3132(b), must be filled by career SES executives. These are positions where the statutory function requires impartiality, technical expertise, or institutional continuity that political appointees would compromise. Examples include inspectors general, certain regulatory enforcement positions, the directorship of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, senior intelligence-community technical positions, and roles where rotation by administration would damage the function the position is designed to perform. Approximately sixty percent of SES positions government-wide are statutorily Career Reserved.

General SES positions can be filled by either career SES executives or by non-career (political) appointees. This is where presidential authority to shape the senior layer of the federal workforce is concentrated, and it is also where the Trump second-administration reclassification effort under Schedule Policy/Career is focused. Approximately forty percent of SES positions are designated General SES.

Limited Term and Limited Emergency SES appointments provide temporary non-career senior executive authority for specific projects or emergencies, typically for terms of three years or less.

The 10 percent statutory cap

By statute at 5 U.S.C. § 3134(a), the total number of non-career (political) appointees in the SES government-wide may not exceed ten percent of all SES positions. The cap was written into the original CSRA in 1978 specifically to prevent any administration from politicizing the senior career layer beyond a statutorily fixed maximum. Through every administration from Carter through Biden, the actual percentage of non-career SES appointees has remained below ten percent.

As documented in Section XII of this Handbook, the cap was exceeded under the second Trump administration. As of January 2026, the non-career percentage of the SES stood at approximately 11.7 percent — making the Trump second-administration SES composition statutorily anomalous and the subject of ongoing AFGE litigation.

SES mobility: the rotational feature

A defining feature of the SES, distinguishing it from the General Schedule civil service below, is mobility. SES executives can and routinely do rotate across agencies, between policy roles and operational roles, between line management and staff advisory positions, and (most consequentially for this Handbook) into and out of government via consulting firms, think tanks, and the political-appointee layer above.

The mobility feature is not incidental. It is the design feature that distinguishes the SES from the underlying GS civil service, where individual positions are tied to specific job series and inter-agency movement is administratively cumbersome. The SES was designed for rotation. It enables the federal government to move expertise where it is needed. It also enables — and this is the structural observation this Handbook documents — the rotational pipeline that moves senior personnel between federal positions and the consulting-firm, think-tank, and CFR layers that surround the federal government.

The Andrea Gacki example is the paradigm case. Gacki entered the Treasury Department in the Bush 43 administration as a career attorney at the Office of Foreign Assets Control. By the end of the Trump first administration she was OFAC Director. She continued as OFAC Director under the Biden administration. In 2023, she moved from OFAC to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, becoming FinCEN Director. She has continued in that role into the Trump second administration. One career Senior Executive Service officer, four presidential administrations, continuous operational authority over the apparatus that designates foreign individuals and entities for sanctions and that surveils the financial activity of every regulated financial institution in the United States. The political appointees above her have changed five times during her career. She has not.

This continuity is not a bug or an accident or a failure of political control. It is the SES's central feature, working as designed.

The intersection with classified appropriations

Senior SES executives at intelligence-community agencies operate within classified appropriations that are public at the topline but opaque at the program level. The two principal classified appropriations are the National Intelligence Program (NIP), which funds the activities of the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the intelligence components of the FBI, Treasury, Energy, Homeland Security, and State Departments; and the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), which funds the Defense Department's intelligence components separately.

The declassified topline figures for fiscal year 2025 are $76.0 billion for the NIP and $25.9 billion for the MIP, for a combined intelligence-community spending total of approximately $101.9 billion. The prior fiscal year totals are $73.4 billion (NIP) and $25.2 billion (MIP) for fiscal year 2024. Approximately eighty percent of this spending is classified at the program level — the topline figure is declassified, but the program-by-program allocation is not.

Career SES officers in the CIA's Senior Intelligence Service (the agency's own SES-equivalent track), the NSA's Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service (DISES), and the equivalent senior tracks at NGA, NRO, and DIA, operate program offices with budgets ranging from tens of millions of dollars to several billion dollars. These budgets are organized into "program elements" and "budget activities" that allow SES managers internal flexibility within congressionally authorized envelopes. The classified portion of these budgets enables operational discretion not subject to public oversight, including covert action authorization, signals intelligence collection priorities, satellite tasking, and offensive cyber operations.

Career SES officers also control sensitive compartmented information (SCI) program access lists. Within an agency, the decision about which other government officials can read which classified programs is administered by career SES executives. Political appointees above them may, in principle, override these decisions, but the day-to-day administration of access is a career-SES function. The implications for institutional continuity are considerable.

Why the SES matters for the personnel architecture

When the four operational features of the SES — career persistence across administrations, classified-budget authority over tens of billions of dollars, program-level access controls that determine which political appointees see which information, and the rotational pipeline that moves senior personnel between government and consulting firms with retained security clearances — are combined, the structural picture is the operational architecture of the permanent foreign-policy establishment. The political appointee class above the SES changes every four to eight years. The SES does not.

The personnel architecture documented in the remainder of this Handbook is built on this SES persistence layer. The CFR cultivation system documented in Section IV produces the individuals who later occupy SES positions. The five-stage policy pipeline documented in Section V converts SES-administered programs into Federal Register implementation. The roster in Part Two names approximately two hundred thirty individuals who occupy positions within this architecture at the senior career layer, the political appointee layer above it, the consulting-firm layer to its side, and the CFR membership rolls that connect them.

The reason this Handbook exists is that the SES is not a secret. Its statutory framework is published. Its pay structure is published. Its operational mechanics are described in personnel-management literature available at any university library. What has not been done, until now, is the systematic mapping of which specific senior career executives occupy which specific positions, which of them are simultaneously affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations through one or another of the four cultivation tracks documented in Section IV, and what the cumulative pattern reveals about the architecture as a functioning system. Section IV moves to the cultivation side of the architecture. Section V moves to the policy-output side. Part Two then populates the architecture with names.

The roster of senior federal officials with CFR affiliations is not assembled by happenstance. It is produced by a structured recruitment system that has operated continuously since the early 1970s. The system has four tracks. Each track has its own selection mechanism, its own duration, and its own downstream effect on the personnel architecture. Understanding the four tracks is the precondition for understanding why the same names appear in the same positions across multiple administrations.

Track One: The fellowship programs

The Council on Foreign Relations operates six fellowship programs that rotate mid-career professionals between CFR's research operation and the federal government, academia, journalism, and the private sector. The fellowships are time-limited placements, typically nine to twelve months in duration. They are not membership; CFR's published rules specifically bar visiting fellows from applying to Term Membership until their fellowship has ended.

The flagship is the International Affairs Fellowship (IAF). Established as CFR's primary cross-pollination program, the IAF runs September through August on a twelve-month cycle, with a stipend currently set at $120,000 plus a travel grant. The program operates two parallel tracks. The Government Track places fellows from CFR, academia, journalism, or the private sector into positions within United States agencies, international organizations, or congressional offices. The CFR Track places fellows from the federal government into CFR for a year of research and writing. CFR's published materials note that the IAF has produced more than 550 alumni, including former Secretaries of State, Under Secretaries, ambassadors, and senior career executives.

The IAF has two specialized regional variants. The IAF in Japan is a twelve-month variant focused on U.S.-Japan relations; its alumni populate Asia-focused positions in State Department East Asian Affairs, the Defense Department's Indo-Pacific Command, and the National Security Council Asia directorates. The Robert A. Belfer International Affairs Fellowship in European Security is a similarly structured variant up to twelve months in length, focused on European security; its alumni populate NATO-policy positions, the State Department's European Affairs bureau, and the Defense Department's European Command leadership.

The Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship is a nine-to-twelve-month resident program for mid-career journalists. Its function within the architecture is distinct. The Murrow Press Fellowship is the documented mechanism that brings working journalists into the CFR network and produces the post-government media commentator pipeline that Pattern Four of this Handbook documents — the trajectory by which career intelligence officers, senior diplomats, and former military officers emerge as authoritative Sunday-show commentators in their post-government careers. Matt Pottinger, who served as Senior Director for Asia on President Trump's first National Security Council and later as Deputy National Security Advisor, was an Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at CFR, as confirmed by CFR's own podcast transcript dated March 25, 2025.

The Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowship is a twelve-month resident program for mid-career scholars and practitioners in nuclear policy. Its alumni populate the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Defense Department's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and the State Department's International Security and Nonproliferation bureau.

The Technologist-in-Residence Fellowship is a variable-duration resident program for mid-career technologists. Its alumni populate emerging cyber- and technology-security positions in the SES and in intelligence community technical roles.

The six fellowships together constitute a sustained, multi-decade talent rotation engine. The 550-plus IAF alumni figure indicates the scale: this is not an incidental program but a continuous structured rotation that moves professionals between CFR and the federal government across an entire career arc.

Track Two: The Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program

The most important single recruitment mechanism in the CFR architecture is not a fellowship. It is the Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program, established in 1971 and named after the Kellen family whose foundation has provided sustained financial support. The Term Member Program is a five-year elected membership track, not a fellowship — Term Members are CFR members, with a specific sub-classification, for the duration of their five-year term.

The eligibility criteria are precise. Applicants must be United States citizens or permanent residents who have applied for citizenship. They must be between thirty and thirty-six years of age on January 1 of the application year. They must have a strong professional record in government, media, NGOs, law, business, finance, or academia. They must be nominated by a current CFR member and seconded by two to three additional CFR members. The application deadline is approximately January 10 each year. Selections are made annually by the CFR Board of Directors.

The nomination requirement is itself a structural feature. Entry into the Term Member Program requires sponsorship by existing CFR members, which means the network reproduces itself across generations: an existing member identifies a promising young professional, sponsors the application, and brings that professional into the network. The mechanism guarantees that the Term Member cohorts are drawn from a population already connected to the existing membership through professional and personal relationships.

Term Members receive full access to CFR's approximately one thousand annual events, the Foreign Affairs journal, briefing materials, Term Member-only events, the annual Term Member Conference (a multi-day gathering of the Term Member cohort), roundtables on specific policy topics, and domestic and international study trips. The study trips routinely include visits to United States military bases, briefings at federal agencies, and approximately weeklong international trips every two years to regions of foreign-policy consequence. The cumulative effect over the five-year term is roughly equivalent to a Master's-degree program in applied foreign-policy practice, with the added feature that the cohort itself becomes a lifelong professional network.

Upon completion of the five-year term, Term Members are invited to apply for full Life Membership. Most accept. Many transition during the term itself, or in the years immediately following, into senior government positions, Senior Executive Service appointments, or consulting-firm partnerships. The Term Member Program functions, in operational terms, as a five-year selection and grooming process for the next generation of CFR Life Members and the next generation of senior personnel across the agencies documented in this Handbook.

The primary-source identification of Term Members in this Handbook is straightforward. The FY2016, FY17, and FY18 CFR Membership Roster PDFs use a dagger (†) marker to identify "Elected to a five-year term membership in [year]." Every individual in those rosters whose name is followed by a dagger is a Kellen Term Member captured at primary-source level. Matan Chorev, the FY18 dagger entry who subsequently became Principal Deputy Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and later a Vice President at the RAND Corporation, is the case study Pattern Fifteen of this Handbook examines in detail.

Track Three: Life Membership

The third track is full CFR Life Membership, the standard membership tier that constitutes the great majority of the approximately 5,400-name Life Membership roster. Most Life Members enter the institution via one of two paths. The first is completion of the Term Member Program and subsequent invitation to apply for Life Membership; this is the structural feeder path. The second is direct election to Life Membership by the CFR Board of Directors, based on the individual's senior professional standing — Cabinet secretaries, former senior officials, leading academics, corporate chief executives, and prominent journalists are often elected directly to Life Membership without passing through the Term Member Program.

The asterisk (*) marker in the FY17 and FY18 PDFs identifies new Life Members elected in those specific years. The FY17 PDF legend reads "*Elected to membership in 2017." The FY18 PDF legend reads "*Elected to membership in 2018." Each annual roster captures a snapshot of the full Life Membership as of a specific date, with election-year markers identifying the most recent additions.

Life Membership, once granted, is for life. There is no term limit. Members in good standing remain members from their election until their death, with the only routine departures being voluntary resignation (rare) or expulsion (extremely rare and tied to specific institutional misconduct). The implication is that the cumulative Life Membership represents the integrated output of every cohort elected since 1921, with adjustments for natural attrition. The continuity of the institution across more than a century is reflected in the membership rolls.

Track Four: Senior Fellows and Distinguished Fellows

The fourth track is the resident expert positions at CFR's David Rockefeller Studies Program. These are paid full-time positions at CFR, occupied by individuals whose work involves producing the research, analysis, books, and Foreign Affairs articles that CFR publishes. Senior Fellow titles can be permanent appointments or term-limited positions. Distinguished Fellow titles are typically conferred on the most senior figures: former Secretaries of State, former National Security Advisors, former Treasury Secretaries, former Cabinet officers.

The structural function of Track Four is the post-government landing pad. Former senior officials are placed in Senior Fellow or Distinguished Fellow positions during their periods out of government. While in residence, they author the books that frame the policy debate in their area of expertise, contribute regularly to Foreign Affairs, brief incoming administrations on the policy questions they previously handled in government, and remain visible as authoritative voices. When the next administration includes their party or coalition, they are positioned for re-entry into senior government roles.

The Track Four roster within this Handbook includes Gina Raimondo (current CFR Distinguished Fellow, former Secretary of Commerce under President Biden), James M. Lindsay (current Mary and David Boies Distinguished Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy), Edward Fishman (current Senior Fellow and Director of the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies, former State Department sanctions lead 2015-2017), Justin G. Muzinich (former CFR Distinguished Fellow, former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under President Trump's first administration), Robert E. Rubin (CFR Chairman Emeritus, former Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton), and Stuart Levey (former CFR Fellow, founding Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence under Presidents Bush 43 and Obama).

How the four tracks interlock

The four tracks form a continuous talent-cultivation pipeline across the professional life cycle.

At ages 30 to 36, selected professionals enter Track Two as Kellen Term Members for a five-year elected membership. The Term Member period is the formation track: structured engagement during the early-career professional formation period.

At mid-career, ages roughly 35 to 50, many of the same individuals (and others entering via different paths) receive a Track One fellowship: an International Affairs Fellowship, an Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellowship, or one of the specialized variants. The fellowships provide structured cross-pollination between the individual's home institution and CFR, typically during a career transition between government and another sector.

Upon completion of the Term Member period (typically in the mid-to-late thirties for those who began the Term Member Program at the standard age), individuals are invited to apply for Track Three Life Membership. Life Membership is permanent; once admitted, the affiliation is for life.

In the post-government phase of senior careers, age 55 and beyond, former Cabinet officers, former National Security Advisors, former senior State Department and Treasury officials are appointed to Track Four resident positions as Senior Fellows or Distinguished Fellows. They author books, contribute to Foreign Affairs, brief incoming administrations, and remain available for re-entry when the political cycle returns their coalition to power.

The cumulative effect is the central observation of this Section IV: by the time a United States official reaches a senior career or political-appointee role at age fifty, the individual has typically passed through one or more of these CFR tracks during the previous twenty years. The Pratt House meetings, the Foreign Affairs publications, the Senate testimony, the statutory language, and the Federal Register implementation are the outputs of the architecture. The four-track recruitment system is the input — the cultivation mechanism that produces the people who later produce the outputs.

The implication for the personnel architecture

The lattice documented in Part Two of this Handbook is not assembled at the moment senior officials enter their senior positions. It is assembled, by design, two decades earlier, through the Track Two Term Member Program. The Track One fellowships augment the cultivation system during mid-career transitions. The Track Three Life Membership consolidates the cohort permanently. The Track Four Senior and Distinguished Fellowships absorb former officials and position them for re-entry.

The five-thousand-four-hundred-name Life Membership roster is the cumulative integrated output of every cohort the cultivation system has produced since 1921, with particular density from the cohorts produced by the Term Member Program since 1971. The current Annual Reports indicate that approximately 387 new Life Members and approximately 200 new Term Members are elected each year — meaning the cultivation system produces roughly 600 new affiliated professionals annually, of whom most will remain affiliated for life.

The architecture is not static. It is a continuously operating talent-cultivation engine that has produced successive cohorts of foreign-policy professionals across more than a century of operation. The roster in Part Two of this Handbook is a snapshot of one moment in that ongoing process. Section V documents how the policy outputs of the architecture are produced through a five-stage pipeline. Section VI begins the inventory of who actually occupies the positions.

The personnel architecture documented in Sections III and IV produces individuals who occupy positions across the federal government and the affiliated consulting, think-tank, and Council layers. This Section V documents the operational mechanism by which the policy preferences developed within the CFR architecture become United States policy through congressional, executive, and regulatory action. The mechanism has five stages. Part III of the Before the Handshake trilogy presents three full case studies of the pipeline in operation; this Section V provides the summary framework for use of this Handbook.

Stage One: Pratt House meetings and Independent Task Forces

Policy positions originate at Pratt House. The Council on Foreign Relations convenes approximately one thousand events each year, including off-the-record member meetings, on-the-record speaker events with foreign and domestic officials, term-member roundtables, and the Independent Task Force program. The Independent Task Force is the most consequential of these formats for policy production. Task Forces are convened on specific subjects, co-chaired by two or three senior figures (typically CFR members with significant standing in the relevant policy area), staffed by a Task Force Director, and populated with twenty-five to forty additional members drawn from the CFR membership, partner think tanks, and the consulting-firm and consulting-finance layers documented in Section X.

Task Forces produce written reports of typically eighty to one hundred fifty pages, with specific recommendations addressed to the United States government. The reports are released publicly with author press conferences, congressional briefings, and coordinated media placements. The recommendations are framed as expert consensus from a non-partisan group of foreign-policy specialists. As Pattern Twelve of this Handbook documents, the recommendations are also, in the cases verified by primary-source documentation, the product of CFR insiders — Task Force co-chairs whose CFR membership status is documented in the FY16/FY17/FY18 Membership Rosters.

Stage Two: Foreign Affairs publication

The Council on Foreign Relations publishes Foreign Affairs, the bimonthly journal founded in 1922 and currently edited by Daniel Kurtz-Phelan. Foreign Affairs is the most influential journal of American foreign-policy discussion. Articles by Cabinet secretaries, former senior officials, ambassadors, and senior CFR fellows define the terms of debate on specific policy questions. The journal's audience is concentrated among senior policymakers, congressional staff, academic specialists, and the foreign-policy press; circulation in mid-2016 was reported at approximately 195,000 in print plus an additional digital readership and a Foreign Affairs LIVE event series.

The publication function within the pipeline is the framing of policy positions in authoritative form. Task Force reports often appear, in summary or expanded form, as Foreign Affairs articles. Senior administration officials use Foreign Affairs to articulate forthcoming policy directions. Former officials use Foreign Affairs to maintain relevance during periods out of government. The cumulative effect is that the policy frames that subsequently appear in administration speeches, congressional testimony, and Federal Register actions have typically been argued first, with attribution to named authors, in Foreign Affairs articles published one to three years earlier.

Part I of the Before the Handshake trilogy documents the November 2025 publication cadence: a sequence of Foreign Affairs articles by senior CFR-affiliated authors published in the weeks immediately before the Trump-Xi summit, addressing precisely the questions the summit was scheduled to discuss. The publication cadence is the framing-and-priming function of Stage Two operating in real time.

Stage Three: Senate testimony

Task Force co-chairs and report authors testify before Senate and House committees on the subjects of their reports. Congressional testimony serves multiple functions within the pipeline. It places Task Force recommendations into the congressional record. It briefs members of Congress and their staffs on the policy positions, providing the foundation for subsequent legislative work. It establishes the witness as a recognized expert whose recommendations should be considered authoritative when relevant legislation is drafted. It generates news coverage that further amplifies the policy framework.

The witnesses in this stage are routinely the same individuals identified as Task Force co-chairs in Stage One and as Foreign Affairs authors in Stage Two. The continuity of authorship across the stages is structural to the pipeline. By Stage Three, the policy position has acquired three layers of institutional authority: it is the product of a CFR Independent Task Force, it has been published in the journal of record, and it has been presented to Congress by an expert witness.

Stage Four: Statutory language

Recommendations from Stages One through Three are incorporated into statutory language. This stage is sometimes direct: a Task Force report identifies a specific legislative provision needed; congressional staff who attended the briefings draft the provision; the provision is included in the next relevant authorization or appropriation bill. The stage is sometimes indirect: the policy framework established in Stages One through Three shapes the language that staff draft when the relevant bill is being prepared, even without direct attribution to the Task Force.

Public Law 108-106, the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense and for the Reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan signed by President George W. Bush in November 2003, provided approximately $87 billion in funding aligned with policy frameworks developed in CFR Task Force reports and related publications by Thomas R. Pickering and James R. Schlesinger and their co-authors. Part III of the trilogy documents this case study in detail. Subsequent legislation through the Obama, Trump first, Biden, and Trump second administrations exhibits the same pattern at varying scales and on varying subjects.

Stage Five: Federal Register implementation

The final stage is regulatory implementation. Statutory language enacted in Stage Four authorizes executive-branch agencies to issue regulations, guidance, and operational directives. The regulations are drafted by career SES officers within the relevant agencies — the same SES layer documented in Section III of this Handbook. The regulations appear in the Federal Register. They have the force of law. The pipeline that began at a Task Force meeting in Pratt House five or seven years earlier reaches its operational conclusion when a SES-drafted regulation is published in the Federal Register and takes effect against regulated entities.

Stage Five is the stage at which the personnel architecture documented in this Handbook becomes fully visible as a connected system. The SES officers who draft the implementing regulations are, in many cases, the same individuals whose CFR affiliations are documented in the roster sections that follow. The Task Force recommendation that began the pipeline and the Federal Register regulation that completes it are connected not only through the substantive policy content but through the personnel — the individuals who participated in the Task Force at Pratt House and who subsequently drafted the regulation at the agency.

The live current example

The November 2025 CFR Independent Task Force on U.S. Economic Security, titled "Winning the Race for Tomorrow's Technologies," is the live current example. The Task Force was co-chaired by Gina Raimondo (former Secretary of Commerce under President Biden, current CFR Distinguished Fellow), Justin G. Muzinich (former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under President Trump's first administration, former CFR Distinguished Fellow, primary-source-confirmed CFR member via FY18 Roster PDF), and James D. Taiclet (Chief Executive Officer of Lockheed Martin, primary-source-confirmed CFR member via all three FY16/17/18 Roster PDFs).

All three co-chairs are CFR members documented at primary-source level. The Task Force recommendations on technology controls, export licensing, and economic-security policy are now visible in Commerce Department export-control rulemaking, Treasury Department investment-screening guidance, and Defense Department industrial-base policy. The pipeline operates currently. Section XIII of this Handbook documents this case study in detail; Part III of the Before the Handshake trilogy provides the full narrative treatment.

The five-stage pipeline is the operational mechanism. The SES is the persistence layer that drafts the implementing regulations. The four-track CFR recruitment system is the cultivation mechanism that produces the personnel who occupy positions at every stage of the pipeline. Sections VI through XI of this Handbook now begin the inventory of those personnel, agency by agency, with each named individual carrying the classification tier and primary-source citation that the verification methodology in Section II prescribes.

The Department of State is the institutional core of the personnel architecture this Handbook documents. The Policy Planning Staff (S/P) — established by Secretary George C. Marshall in 1947 and led first by George F. Kennan, author of the foundational Foreign Affairs article on Soviet containment — is the State Department's internal strategic-policy office. Nineteen of the twenty most recent Directors of Policy Planning have either been Council on Foreign Relations members or have served from positions within the affiliated think-tank and consulting-firm lattice. The break in 2025, when Trump's second administration appointed Michael A. Needham (former Heritage Foundation president) to the Counselor and S/P Director role, is the first identifiable departure from the pattern in approximately forty years.

This section presents the State Department roster in three groups: the Policy Planning Staff chronology from Kennan to the present; the senior career Foreign Service Officer and political appointee layer that occupies the Under Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and Assistant Secretary positions; and the cross-administration State Department executives whose careers span Republican and Democratic administrations and whose continuity demonstrates the SES persistence layer documented in Section III.

The Policy Planning Staff chronology, 1947 to present

Below are eighteen Directors of the Policy Planning Staff covering the period 1947 to the present. The chronology is the longest single thread of documented institutional continuity in the personnel architecture this Handbook tracks. Filter the roster by tier to see how the membership pattern concentrates.

Policy Planning Principal Deputies and senior S/P staff

Below the Director are the Principal Deputy Director and senior staff of Policy Planning. These positions are SES-equivalent senior career roles. The Principal Deputy Director under the Biden administration is the documented case study Pattern Fifteen examines: the Kellen Term Member who later occupies a senior career position at exactly the institutional location the Term Member Program was designed to feed.

Senior career State Department executives, cross-administration

The senior career and political-appointee layer at State extends beyond Policy Planning to the Under Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and Assistant Secretary positions filled by senior Foreign Service Officers who span Republican and Democratic administrations. The roster below documents fourteen individuals whose careers run through this layer.

State Department under the second Trump administration

The State Department has been the focus of significant Trump second-administration personnel action. The major events as of the date of this Handbook are documented below; full operational consequences will be tracked in Section XII (the Trump 2 contest).

The pattern observation

Of the eighteen Directors of Policy Planning documented above spanning approximately seventy-five years (1947 to 2025), at least twelve are confirmed Council on Foreign Relations members in primary sources, with several additional Directors confirmed at the Lattice tier through Hoover, AEI, Brookings, Carnegie, or related institutional affiliations. The break in 2025 with Michael Needham's appointment is the first identifiable departure from the pattern in approximately forty years. The break is significant precisely because it is unusual — and because, as documented in Section XII, it is paired with a broader Trump 2 personnel strategy aimed at the SES persistence layer that this Handbook documents throughout.

The Council on Foreign Relations and its affiliated lattice has been the recruitment pool for senior State Department personnel across Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The pattern documented here is not partisan; it is structural. Section VII now turns to the Treasury Department, where the sanctions and financial intelligence apparatus exhibits a similar pattern with the operational consequences of geoeconomic warfare attached.

The Department of the Treasury's Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) is the operational center of United States geoeconomic warfare. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) administers economic sanctions; the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) administers anti-money-laundering authority and the Bank Secrecy Act; the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA) is one of the eighteen agencies of the U.S. intelligence community. TFI was established by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Its first Under Secretary, Stuart Levey, served continuously from 2004 to 2011 across the Bush 43 and Obama administrations and built the modern "financial chokepoints" doctrine that operates today.

The structural feature this section documents is the contrast between TFI's political-appointee layer — heavily lattice-affiliated across administrations — and its career SES operating layer below. The political appointees rotate every four to eight years. The career SES officers do not. Andrea Gacki is the paradigm case: career OFAC attorney since the Bush 43 administration, OFAC Director under Trump 1 and Biden, FinCEN Director under Biden and continuing into Trump 2. One career SES officer, four presidential administrations, continuous operational authority over the sanctions and financial-intelligence apparatus.

The lattice-saturation observation extends to the Treasury Secretary level. Scott Bessent, the second Trump administration's Treasury Secretary, was confirmed as a Council on Foreign Relations member in the FY17 Membership Roster PDF — meaning his CFR membership was established by July 2017, approximately eight years before his Treasury appointment. The Bessent placement at Treasury is the most significant single individual placement in the second Trump administration cabinet from a lattice-saturation perspective: the operational center of geoeconomic warfare is led by a Council member whose affiliation predates the administration.

OFAC career office directors

The OFAC career layer below the political appointees consists of office directors at the SES level operating the sanctions licensing, enforcement, and target-specific regional sanctions programs. These positions are filled by career civil service executives whose specific names are less publicly documented than the political-appointee layer, but whose continuity across administrations is consequential. The general organizational structure includes:

The Treasury pattern observation

The TFI political-appointee layer (Under Secretary, Assistant Secretary positions) is heavily lattice-saturated across administrations. The career SES layer below is less publicly documented at the individual level but operates with significant continuity. Andrea Gacki is the paradigm case — Acting Director, Director, and then FinCEN Director across Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2. This is the SES persistence mechanism documented in Section III operating at the institution most central to United States geoeconomic policy.

The Bessent-at-Treasury finding adds the political-appointee-layer continuity to the career-SES-layer continuity. Even in the second Trump administration, where multiple visible cabinet positions broke with the traditional CFR recruitment pattern, the operational center of geoeconomic warfare — Treasury, with its TFI/OFAC/FinCEN authority over the sanctions and financial intelligence infrastructure — was filled by a Council member whose affiliation predated the administration by eight years. Section VIII now turns to Defense and Intelligence, where the consulting-firm triangle of CNAS, CSIS, and WestExec operates as the most visible rotational pipeline in the personnel architecture.

The Department of Defense senior career and political appointee layer overlaps with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and WestExec Advisors in patterns that are not incidental. Senior personnel routinely move from a position at one of the three institutions into a senior DOD or NSC role, and back to one of the three institutions upon departure from government. The three institutions function, in operational terms, as a connected feeder network for senior defense policy positions across administrations. This Section VIII documents the senior individuals operating across the triangle and the intelligence community senior layer that recruits from a similar but smaller institutional ecosystem.

The triangle, visualized

The DOD senior career and political hybrid layer

The roster below documents fifteen senior Department of Defense executives whose roles span the political appointee and senior career layers. Filter by tier to see how the CFR and lattice patterns concentrate.

The intelligence community senior layer

The intelligence community senior career layer overlaps with the Council on Foreign Relations Studies Program at a density second only to the Department of State. Multiple former senior intelligence community officials sit on CFR boards, publish in Foreign Affairs, and operate as CFR Senior Fellows or Distinguished Fellows after retirement. The pipeline is especially clean because retired senior IC officials who become CFR fellows often then become Sunday-show "former CIA Director" or "former Director of National Intelligence" commentators — exactly the Tier Two media-carrier mechanism documented in the companion Three-Tier Handbook.

The roster below documents twelve individuals operating in the senior intelligence community across multiple administrations. The CIA Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) is the agency's internal SES-equivalent track. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence senior layer is treated jointly.

CNAS, the DOD-adjacent CFR

The Center for a New American Security warrants particular attention. Founded in 2007 by Kurt Campbell and Michèle Flournoy, CNAS operates as, in functional terms, the DOD-adjacent Council on Foreign Relations. Its analytical doctrine on U.S. competition with China, on the technology-driven Third Offset Strategy, on Indo-Pacific strategy, and on operational concepts for great-power conflict has been the source material for Pentagon strategy documents across multiple administrations. CNAS produces the analytical framework; senior CNAS personnel then move into senior Pentagon positions to implement it; they rotate back to CNAS upon departure.

CNAS funding is heavily defense-industry-derived. The center's published donor reports identify Northrop Grumman as a five-hundred-thousand-dollar-plus annual contributor, plus contributions from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and the U.S. State Department itself. Oil-and-gas industry lobbying is reflected in the donor disclosures as well. The funding structure aligns CNAS analytical output with the operational interests of the defense and energy industries whose business is most directly affected by the strategic frameworks CNAS produces.

The CNAS-to-government pipeline is observably continuous. Michèle Flournoy moved from her co-founding role at CNAS to Obama DOD Under Secretary for Policy, back to private-sector consulting via WestExec (which she also co-founded), and now sits on the CFR Board of Directors. Ely Ratner moved from Obama NSC to CNAS Director of Studies to Biden DOD Assistant Secretary for Indo-Pacific Security. Susanna Blume moved from her career at DOD to CNAS senior fellow back to DOD CAPE Director. Robert Work moved from CNAS CEO to Obama Deputy SecDef back to CNAS senior advisor. Richard Fontaine currently serves as CNAS President after his role as a senior national security adviser to Senator John McCain.

Pattern observation for Section VIII

The Department of Defense senior career and political appointee layer is connected through the CNAS-CSIS-WestExec triangle in patterns the roster cards above make explicit. Of the fifteen DOD senior individuals documented above, three carry CFR-Member classifications and one carries CFR-Member Board of Directors classification (Flournoy), with the remaining individuals occupying Lattice or Consulting positions documented through their CSIS, CNAS, WestExec, RAND, Brookings, or Atlantic Council affiliations. Every Biden-administration Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy, every Biden-administration senior NSC Asia or Indo-Pacific director, and every senior Biden-administration Air Force and Army civilian leader for whom this Handbook has primary-source data passed through at least one of the three triangle institutions during a non-government interval.

The intelligence community senior layer overlaps with the CFR Studies Program at a density second only to the Department of State, with the career-SIS-officer-to-CFR-member-to-Sunday-show-commentator pipeline particularly visible in the cases of James Clapper, Beth Sanner, and the broader pattern Three-Tier Handbook documents in its companion treatment.

Sections IX (specialty agencies), X (consulting firms), and XI (political overlay) extend the inventory across the remaining institutional architecture. Section XII documents the second Trump administration's contest with this personnel architecture. Section XIII presents the live current case study — Task Force 83 — where the architecture documented across Sections VI through XI is operating in real time.

Beyond State, Treasury, and Defense, the federal foreign-policy and economic-security architecture extends into five additional institutional clusters. Each cluster has its own senior career layer, its own lattice connections, and its own distinctive pattern of CFR engagement. The HHS pandemic-preparedness apparatus connects more to Johns Hopkins and the Gates Foundation than to CFR proper, but the CFR Burwell-Townsend Task Force placed CFR-published doctrine directly into the institutional bloodstream. The NNSA nuclear-weapons complex operates within a tighter lattice anchored to the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Carnegie's nonproliferation program. The CISA cybersecurity apparatus repeats the CNAS-CSIS-WestExec triangle in compressed form, with the additional Cyberspace Solarium Commission node. The NSC professional staff is one of the most important rotation points in the entire architecture. Commerce and BIS operate the export-control machinery that the Raimondo-Muzinich-Taiclet Task Force documented in Part III recommended expanding.

HHS, ASPR, BARDA, and the pandemic-preparedness architecture

The pandemic-preparedness architecture documented in Part III of the Before the Handshake trilogy (Case Study Two, the Burwell-Townsend CFR Task Force) was implemented through a specific career SES corps at HHS, primarily within the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and the National Institutes of Health. CFR connections here run more through Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Center for Health Security, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the pharmaceutical industry than through Pratt House proper — but the CFR Task Force explicitly briefed Anthony Fauci at NIAID, which places NIH/NIAID architecturally adjacent to Pratt House for purposes of this roster.

Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration

The National Nuclear Security Administration is the semi-autonomous DOE component that maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and operates the three National Laboratories at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia. Annual budget approximately $20 to $24 billion. Workforce approximately 60,000 across federal staff and contractor-operated laboratories. The senior career layer at NNSA connects to a tighter ecosystem than State or DOD: the Brookings Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology; the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI); the Carnegie Endowment's nuclear-policy program; the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School; and the broader arms-control community. CFR connections run through nonproliferation and arms-control programming.

DHS and CISA cybersecurity senior layer

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency was created in 2018 as the federal lead for civilian cybersecurity, election infrastructure protection, and critical infrastructure resilience. Its senior career and senior-advisor layer connects heavily to the CNAS Technology and National Security Program, the CSIS Intelligence-National-Security-Technology Program, the Cyberspace Solarium Commission (created by Congress in 2019), the National Security Agency, and distinctively to WestExec Advisors. CISA was a primary target of second Trump administration reorganization; its election security mission has been eliminated.

National Security Council professional staff

The NSC professional staff is one of the most important rotation points in the entire architecture. NSC directorate staff — Senior Directors, Directors for specific regional and functional portfolios — typically come from CFR senior fellow positions, from the Atlantic Council, from CNAS, or from career State, DOD, and intelligence community backgrounds. NSC directorate alumni then routinely return to CFR or lattice fellowships after departing the White House. The second Trump administration cut the NSC by approximately two-thirds in May 2025.

Commerce, USTR, and the Bureau of Industry and Security

The Department of Commerce, the U.S. Trade Representative's office, and the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS, which administers export controls) are the operational center of the economic-security architecture documented in Part III of the Before the Handshake trilogy as Case Study Three — the Raimondo-Muzinich-Taiclet Task Force whose recommendations are now being implemented across Commerce, Treasury, and Defense. Section XIII of this Handbook treats that Task Force as the live current case study.

Specialty agencies pattern observation

Across the five specialty-agency clusters documented in Section IX, the pattern of CFR and lattice engagement varies in density but holds in structure. The HHS pandemic-preparedness apparatus connects through Johns Hopkins, the Gates Foundation, and the pharmaceutical industry rather than directly to Pratt House, but the CFR Burwell-Townsend Task Force placed CFR-published doctrine directly into the institutional bloodstream through Anthony Fauci as expert briefer. The NNSA nuclear-weapons complex operates within the tighter Nuclear Threat Initiative / Brookings / Carnegie nonproliferation ecosystem, with the rotational pipeline NTI-to-NNSA-to-NTI observable across multiple individuals. The CISA cybersecurity apparatus repeats the CNAS-CSIS-WestExec triangle in compressed form, with the additional Cyberspace Solarium Commission node, and the John Costello case as the triple-lattice example. The NSC professional staff rotates between CFR fellowships, Brookings, CNAS, and the federal government as one of the architecture's principal rotation points. The Commerce-BIS-USTR cluster operates the export-control and trade-policy machinery that the Raimondo-Muzinich-Taiclet Task Force documented in Part III recommended expanding — and the same Task Force co-chairs whose CFR membership is documented in Section II appear in the live current case study in Section XIII.

The structural conclusion: the lattice extends across every senior-policy-making cluster of the federal foreign-policy and economic-security architecture, with the form of engagement varying by cluster's analytical specialization. Sections X and XI now document the consulting-firm landing pads that absorb senior personnel between government roles, and the subnational political layer where the architecture operates least densely.

Five private consulting firms function as the principal post-government landing pads in the personnel architecture this Handbook documents. Senior officials departing senior federal positions rotate to one or more of these firms between administrations. While in consulting practice they retain security clearances (where applicable), maintain access to current government counterparts, advise corporate clients on regulatory and policy matters, and remain positioned for re-entry into senior federal roles when their coalition returns to power. The firms function, in operational terms, as parallel infrastructure to the CFR Track Four resident-fellow system documented in Section IV — both perform the same structural role of housing senior officials between government appointments.

This Section X documents the five principal firms and the senior individuals associated with each. The cross-listings are extensive: many individuals appear in more than one firm's senior advisor or partner roster simultaneously or sequentially. The cross-listing pattern is itself a finding about the firms' operational integration with one another.

Albright Stonebridge Group

Albright Stonebridge Group (ASG) was founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2009. Currently operates as a Dentons company. ASG operates as a global strategic advisory firm; its senior counselor positions have hosted multiple senior State Department and NSC alumni between government roles. Documented clients have included Hilton, Amazon, Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Endeavor Energy. Senior counselor compensation has reached $500,000-plus in salary and profit-sharing for senior figures (Linda Thomas-Greenfield's disclosed earnings being the documented example).

ASG senior counselors documented in this Handbook include Linda Thomas-Greenfield (between government roles, now on CFR Board), Wendy Sherman (between State roles), Victoria Nuland (between State roles), Brian Nelson (before Treasury TFI), James O'Brien (before State EUR), Sarah Bianchi (before USTR Deputy), and additional figures cross-listed across the State, Treasury, and Commerce sections.

WestExec Advisors

WestExec Advisors was founded in 2017 by Antony Blinken and Michèle Flournoy, joined subsequently by additional partners. The firm has been characterized in reporting as the "Biden cabinet incubator" because of the high concentration of WestExec affiliates who subsequently received senior Biden-administration appointments, including Blinken himself as Secretary of State, Flournoy in continued senior advisory roles, Avril Haines (DNI), Lisa Monaco (Deputy Attorney General), Sasha Baker (Deputy Under Secretary of Defense), Daniel Shapiro (State Department), Julianne Smith (NATO Ambassador), John Costello (multi-agency cybersecurity senior roles), and additional figures. The firm operates with extensive nondisclosure agreements with corporate clients; published client lists are partial.

Beacon Global Strategies

Beacon Global Strategies (BGS) was founded by former intelligence community senior officials. The firm specializes in geopolitical risk advisory, sanctions and export-control consulting, and defense-industrial-base strategy. Recent senior-advisor hires include Kevin Kurland (joining BGS in January 2026 after 28 years at BIS) and additional former BIS, Treasury TFI, and intelligence community senior officials. The firm's specialty in export-control and industrial-strategy practice connects directly to the Raimondo-Muzinich-Taiclet Task Force agenda documented in Sections II and XIII.

Pine Island Capital Partners

Pine Island Capital Partners is a private-equity firm with an aerospace and defense investment mandate. Antony Blinken was associated with Pine Island before his Biden Secretary of State appointment. The firm's investment thesis intersects directly with the defense-acquisition and aerospace policy frameworks documented in Section VIII of this Handbook.

BlackRock Investment Institute

BlackRock Investment Institute is the research and policy arm of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager. Thomas Donilon — former Obama National Security Advisor, CFR Board of Directors member, Trilateral Commission member — serves as BlackRock Investment Institute chairman. The Institute's research output on macroeconomic policy, geopolitical risk, and the energy transition is publicly available and frequently cited in Foreign Affairs and CFR programming. The intersection of senior financial industry research output with the CFR institutional architecture operates through this node.

The consulting-firm pattern observation

The five firms documented in Section X — Albright Stonebridge, WestExec, Beacon Global Strategies, Pine Island Capital, and BlackRock Investment Institute (with The Cohen Group, The Asia Group, KKR Global Institute, and Macro Advisory Partners noted as additional adjacent firms) — together constitute a parallel post-government infrastructure operating alongside the CFR Track Four resident-fellow system documented in Section IV. The two infrastructures perform the same structural function: housing senior officials between government roles, maintaining their access to current government counterparts, providing income consistent with senior private-sector compensation, and positioning the officials for re-entry into senior federal roles when their coalition returns to power.

The cross-listing pattern between firms and CFR Track Four is dense. Antony Blinken at WestExec, on the CFR member roster. Michèle Flournoy at WestExec, CNAS co-founder, on the CFR Board. Thomas Donilon at BlackRock Investment Institute, on the CFR Board. Linda Thomas-Greenfield at Albright Stonebridge, on the CFR Board. The consulting firms and the CFR Board are not parallel separate institutions; they are overlapping institutional layers occupied frequently by the same individuals.

The operational consequence is that, at any given moment, the senior personnel of an outgoing administration are systematically absorbed into the consulting-firm and CFR Senior Fellow layers, where they remain available for re-deployment. The personnel architecture this Handbook documents is, in this respect, a continuously operating talent-rotation system that operates independently of the four-year electoral cycle.

The personnel architecture this Handbook documents operates primarily at the federal level. State governors, state attorneys general, state secretaries of state, and major-city mayors — the subnational political class — show dramatically lower CFR and lattice penetration than the federal cabinet and SES layers. Across fifty state governors, approximately fifty state attorneys general, approximately fifty state secretaries of state, and approximately two hundred major-city mayors at any given moment — across roughly a decade — only a handful of confirmed CFR memberships surface in the public record. This subnational sparseness is captured below as Pattern Ten and constitutes one of the more revealing findings about the architecture's institutional design.

The verification discipline applied in this Section XI is stricter than in earlier sections. The CFR-WIKIPEDIA-LISTED intermediate tier is used for names that appear on secondary-source compilations (notably the Wikipedia "Members of the Council on Foreign Relations" page) without independent CFR primary-source confirmation. The intermediate tier acknowledges the secondary documentation honestly while marking the absence of primary-source verification.

Pattern Ten — the subnational sparseness observation

The political appointee overlay at the subnational level shows dramatically lower CFR and lattice penetration than the federal cabinet and SES layers. Across fifty state governors, approximately fifty state attorneys general, approximately fifty state secretaries of state, and approximately two hundred major-city mayors at any given moment — across roughly a decade — only a handful of confirmed CFR memberships surface in the public record. Raimondo is the cleanest example because she crossed from state government into federal foreign-economic policy and was absorbed into the lattice through that crossing, not during her state tenure. Bloomberg is the cleanest mayor-tier example because Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies independently constitute Tier One financial-news infrastructure. Ellison is the only documented state attorney general with confirmed CFR membership across the period studied.

What the sparseness tells us. The Pratt House architecture is federal-foreign-policy-focused by design. The 1921 incorporation, the 1922 founding of Foreign Affairs, the 1939–1945 War and Peace Studies, the Task Force program — all of it is structured around national-level foreign and economic policy. State governments and city governments are outside the architecture's operating zone almost entirely. When state-level officials enter the lattice, they typically enter after their state tenure ends and they cross into federal roles or post-government think-tank positions. The five-stage pipeline documented in Section V is a federal pipeline. The subnational political layer is essentially outside it.

What this confirms about the architecture's design. The lattice does not need to capture state governors to operate the foreign-policy and economic-security apparatus it operates. Federal cabinet positions, the career SES below them, the consulting-firm landing pads, the think tanks, the media platforms — these are the operating layers. The subnational political class is structurally separate. This is not a flaw in the lattice; it is the design. The architecture operates above the state level by design and does not extend downward.

The implication for the contest documented in Section XII. Pattern Ten reinforces the federal-centric framing of the entire Handbook and explains why the SES contest under the second Trump administration operates at the federal level rather than spilling into state government. The architecture has never operated at the state level in the way it operates at the federal level. The fight over the federal SES is not paralleled by a comparable fight over state government because the lattice never extended into state government in the first place. The contest is, structurally, a contest over a specifically federal institutional layer — which is precisely where the architecture has always operated.

Part Three of this Handbook now turns to that contest. Section XII documents the second Trump administration's personnel actions against the federal SES, including the Schedule Policy/Career reclassification effort, the AFGE litigation tracker, and the SES headcount metrics. Section XIII presents Task Force 83 as the live current case study: the architecture documented across Sections VI through XI operating in real time, with named individuals whose CFR membership has been documented in primary sources, producing policy outputs now visible in the Federal Register.

The personnel architecture documented in Parts One and Two of this Handbook is, at the time of this writing, the subject of an active and unprecedented operational contest. The second Trump administration has moved against the federal Senior Executive Service through a sequence of executive orders, Office of Personnel Management rulemakings, reduction-in-force notices, and reclassification efforts. The statutory framework that has governed the SES since the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act is being tested in ways it has not been tested in the program's forty-seven year history. Federal courts have issued preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders blocking aspects of the effort; the executive branch has continued the effort within the bounds the courts have permitted. The contest is operational and ongoing. This Section XII documents the contest as a factual record.

The headcount metrics

The most immediately measurable outcome of the second Trump administration's first year of personnel action against the federal workforce is the SES headcount itself. The career SES total at the end of the Biden administration was approximately 8,127 executives. As of January 2026, the career SES total stands at approximately 5,837 — a reduction of approximately 28 percent. This is the lowest career SES total recorded since 1998.

The 11.7 percent figure for non-career SES appointees as a percentage of the overall SES is the statutorily anomalous figure. The 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, at 5 U.S.C. § 3134(a), provides that non-career appointees may not exceed ten percent of the total SES positions government-wide. Through every administration from Carter through Biden, the actual percentage remained below ten percent. The second Trump administration has exceeded the cap. The legal consequence of this excess is the subject of pending AFGE litigation; the political consequence is that the senior career layer of the federal government has been politicized beyond the statutorily authorized maximum for the first time in the program's history.

The Schedule Policy/Career reclassification effort

The principal mechanism by which the second Trump administration has approached the SES is the Schedule Policy/Career classification — a revival and expansion of the Schedule F framework first introduced in the final months of the first Trump administration. The mechanism operates by reclassifying career federal positions from Career Reserved or competitive-service status into a new "Schedule Policy/Career" category, in which the position-holders serve at the pleasure of the administration without the procedural protections that career civil servants ordinarily receive.

The Office of Personnel Management final rule of February 5, 2026, targets approximately 50,000 federal positions for reclassification into Schedule Policy/Career. The OPM rule explicitly excludes the standard civil-service termination procedures from reclassified positions. The functional effect, if the rule survives litigation, is the conversion of approximately 50,000 senior career positions into positions removable at presidential discretion.

The Schedule Policy/Career reclassification was developed alongside Executive Order 14171 and related executive orders issued in the early months of 2025. The legal challenge to these orders is the subject of PEER, AFGE, AFSCME, AFL-CIO, Democracy Forward v. Trump, the Second Amended Complaint of which was filed on March 4, 2026. The case is the principal vehicle for the federal employee unions' challenge to the underlying reclassification framework.

The AFGE litigation tracker

Six major federal court cases challenge various aspects of the second Trump administration's personnel actions against the federal workforce. The cases are tracked below. Together they constitute the legal architecture of the contest documented in this Section XII.

Career SES dismissals and resistance-visible officials

Below the litigation layer, the contest is conducted person by person. Specific career executives have been publicly visible in dismissal, reassignment, or whistleblower posture against the second Trump administration's actions. The roster below identifies named individuals whose case histories have been documented in public reporting.

What the contest looks like, in operational form

The contest documented in this Section XII operates on three simultaneous tracks. The first track is executive-order issuance and OPM rulemaking, which establishes the formal legal framework of reclassification. The second track is implementation: reduction-in-force notices, deferred-resignation programs, individual dismissals, and the operational reduction of the career SES headcount from approximately 8,127 to 5,837. The third track is litigation: six major federal court cases challenging the orders, the rulemakings, and specific individual personnel actions, with preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders entered in the principal cases as of the date of this Handbook.

The contest is also, structurally, a contest specifically over the institutional layer this Handbook documents. The Schedule Policy/Career reclassification targets approximately 50,000 federal positions; these positions are concentrated in the senior career layer where the CFR and lattice affiliations documented in Part Two are most dense. The political-appointee SES at 11.7 percent of the total — exceeding the statutory 10 percent cap — represents a deliberate effort to expand the political-appointee fraction at the expense of the career layer. The career SES reductions in headcount, when sufficient detail becomes publicly available agency by agency, can be expected to fall disproportionately on the senior policy-making positions where the lattice's institutional density is highest.

The political layer of the second Trump administration cabinet itself shows the conscious break with traditional CFR recruitment that has been visible since the administration's earliest appointments. As documented in Pattern Nine of Section XIV of this Handbook, the Secretaries of State (Marco Rubio, CFR-Adjacent rather than full member), Defense (Pete Hegseth), and Commerce (Howard Lutnick) fall outside the traditional CFR cabinet-recruitment pattern. The conspicuous exception is Treasury (Scott Bessent), where the cabinet position most directly central to United States geoeconomic policy was filled by a primary-source-confirmed CFR member whose membership predated the administration by eight years. The break runs through the political layer first, and the structural follow-on is the SES contest documented in this Section XII: changing the political appointee class without changing the career SES layer beneath them allows the architecture to survive; changing both is the only structural threat the architecture has faced in the SES's forty-seven year history.

The architecture documented in Parts One and Two of this Handbook is, accordingly, in a state of active contest. The outcome of the contest is not yet known. The federal courts have meaningfully constrained the administration's execution of the reclassification effort but have not invalidated the underlying framework. The 2026 election cycle and any subsequent presidential transition will determine whether the contest reverses, consolidates, or extends. Section XIII now turns to a different facet of the same architecture operating during the same period: the live current CFR Independent Task Force on Economic Security, whose three co-chairs are primary-source-confirmed Council members and whose policy recommendations are appearing in implementation across Commerce, Treasury, and Defense even as the contest documented in this Section XII proceeds.

Section XII documented the contest. This Section XIII documents the architecture operating concurrently with the contest. The same months during which the second Trump administration has reduced the career SES from 8,127 to 5,837 and exceeded the statutory cap on non-career appointees have also been the months during which a Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on U.S. Economic Security — co-chaired by three primary-source-confirmed CFR members — has issued recommendations that are now appearing in Commerce Department export-control rulemaking, Treasury Department investment-screening guidance, and Defense Department industrial-base policy frameworks. The five-stage pipeline documented in Section V is operating in real time, in the open, while the personnel architecture documented in Parts One and Two is the simultaneous subject of an unprecedented contest.

The Task Force, named

The November 2025 CFR Independent Task Force on U.S. Economic Security, titled Winning the Race for Tomorrow's Technologies, was convened by the Council on Foreign Relations and released its final report in November 2025. The Task Force is designated Task Force Report Number 83 in the Council's Independent Task Force program — a series of named, numbered Task Forces extending back several decades and constituting the principal mechanism by which CFR generates branded policy frameworks for U.S. government adoption. The Task Force is referred to in this Handbook as Task Force 83 for clarity of reference.

The three co-chairs of Task Force 83 are Gina M. Raimondo, Justin G. Muzinich, and James D. Taiclet. The full Task Force membership includes approximately 25 additional members drawn from CFR's Life Membership, the consulting-firm layer documented in Section X, the senior academic community, and the corporate sector. The Task Force Director is a CFR Senior Fellow. The Task Force operating staff is provided by CFR's Independent Task Force program.

The three co-chairs, in primary-source detail

What Task Force 83 demonstrates

All three co-chairs of Task Force 83 are primary-source-confirmed CFR members. This is not a question of inference, secondary-source citation, or "deep institutional record." Raimondo's CFR Distinguished Fellow status is documented by CFR's own appointment announcement of January 27, 2025. Muzinich appears in the FY18 Membership Roster PDF at primary-source level. Taiclet appears in all three FY16, FY17, and FY18 Membership Roster PDFs at primary-source level. The Task Force is not an "external expert consultation" of independent voices brought together for analytical balance. It is an internal CFR product, co-chaired by three confirmed Council members, producing policy recommendations under CFR's institutional imprimatur.

The recommendations of Task Force 83 are also not theoretical. They are now appearing in implementation. The proposed Economic Security Center at Commerce is being implemented under the current Commerce Department restructuring documented in Section IX. Treasury Department investment-screening guidance has shifted in directions aligned with the Task Force recommendations. Defense Department industrial-base policy frameworks are incorporating recommendations from the Task Force report. The five-stage pipeline from Pratt House (Stage One, the Task Force itself) through Foreign Affairs publication (Stage Two, where Task Force recommendations have been published as articles) through Senate testimony (Stage Three, where the co-chairs have testified) through statutory language (Stage Four, pending the next relevant authorization or appropriation bill) to Federal Register implementation (Stage Five, currently underway through agency rulemaking) is operating in observable form. The architecture documented across the entire Before the Handshake trilogy and this Handbook is not a structural claim that requires inference. It is a documented operational mechanism currently in progress.

The lattice diagram

The simultaneity, and what it means

The most consequential observation of Section XIII is the simultaneity. The same calendar months during which the second Trump administration has reduced the career SES by approximately 28 percent and exceeded the statutory cap on non-career appointees have been the months during which Task Force 83's three CFR co-chairs have produced policy recommendations now appearing in implementation across the same federal agencies subject to the SES contest. The political-appointee class of the second Trump administration broke with the traditional CFR cabinet-recruitment pattern in its initial appointments. The career SES layer is now being aggressively contested. And yet the architecture's policy-output mechanism — the Task Force, the recommendations, the implementation — continues to operate.

The structural explanation is that the architecture documented in this Handbook is not exhausted by any single layer. The political-appointee layer at the cabinet level can change. The career SES layer can be reduced and reclassified. The CFR Task Force mechanism, the consulting-firm landing-pad layer, the Foreign Affairs publication function, the Senate testimony pathway, the statutory-language drafting practice, and the Federal Register implementation through agencies — these are multiple operating layers, each with its own personnel, each with its own institutional inertia. Removing or reducing any one layer does not necessarily disable the architecture's policy-output function. The architecture has multiple redundancies built in across its four-track recruitment system (Section IV) and its five-stage pipeline (Section V).

The single most consequential individual placement in the second Trump administration cabinet from a lattice-saturation perspective is the Treasury Secretary. Scott Bessent's primary-source-confirmed CFR membership (FY17 + FY18 PDFs) places a Council member at the operational center of United States geoeconomic policy. Bessent's Treasury Department is one of the three federal destinations to which Task Force 83's recommendations are flowing. The Treasury investment-screening guidance shifts that have followed the Task Force report's publication are decisions made under Secretary Bessent — a confirmed CFR member implementing recommendations co-chaired by two additional confirmed CFR members (Muzinich, who himself previously served as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, and Taiclet) plus a CFR Distinguished Fellow (Raimondo). The implementation is internal to the lattice in every direction.

The Handbook's central documentary claim, taken in conjunction with the Before the Handshake trilogy as the operational pair to this Handbook's personnel-architecture treatment, is that the architecture is durable across electoral cycles by design. Section XII documents the active contest. Section XIII documents the simultaneous operation. The two are not contradictory; they are the architecture being tested at one layer while continuing to operate at others. Whether the contest ultimately constrains the architecture or proves the architecture's resilience is the question the next several years will answer.

Part Four of this Handbook now turns to the reference layer: the fifteen Pattern Observations developed across eight verification rounds (Section XIV), the primary-source URL universe with verification protocols (Section XV), and the full classification system and acronym glossary (Section XVI). The reference layer permits researchers to extend the work, to verify specific claims, and to apply the methodology to additional personnel or institutional questions beyond those documented here.

The roster work documented in Parts Two and Three of this Handbook produced fifteen analytical observations during the verification process. The Patterns are numbered in the order they were identified during the eight integration rounds described in Section II. Each Pattern names a structural feature of the personnel architecture. Each is grounded in specific evidence from the roster cards and the source materials. Researchers can challenge any individual Pattern by challenging the underlying evidence. The Patterns are presented in the order they emerged, not in any priority ranking — the patterns identified late in the verification process are not less consequential than those identified early.

How the fifteen patterns interconnect

The fifteen patterns are not independent observations. They interlock. Pattern Fifteen (Kellen Term Member cultivation at age 30) is the input mechanism that produces the personnel who later occupy the positions documented in Patterns One through Five (Policy Planning, TFI, CNAS-CSIS-WestExec, IC-to-Sunday-show, NNSA nuclear-policy). Pattern Eight (consulting-firm landing pads) is the parallel infrastructure that absorbs those personnel between government roles. Pattern Nine (political-appointee overlay mirroring SES feeder pipelines) is the structural finding that explains why the recruitment system produces consistent output across electoral cycles. Pattern Ten (subnational sparseness) explains why the architecture is federal-only by design. Patterns Eleven through Fourteen are the methodological patterns — they describe how the verification process itself works and why the Handbook's classifications are defensible. Pattern Twelve (CFR Task Force as direct policy mechanism) is the synthesizing observation: the Pratt House to Federal Register pipeline is not theoretical, it is documented in CFR's own records via Task Force 83. Pattern Six (the Trump 2 SES contest) is the live operational test of whether the architecture is durable under deliberate political pressure. Pattern Seven (the 2025 Policy Planning break) is the structural marker that confirms the Trump 2 personnel strategy is aware of the architecture and targeting it specifically.

The verification architecture described in Section II is anchored to three Council on Foreign Relations Membership Roster PDFs hosted on the institution's own server. These three PDFs together constitute the complete public-roster verification universe for the pre-2019 period. Researchers wishing to verify any CFR-Member classification anchored to roster-PDF citation can access the source documents at the URLs below.

The three roster PDFs

Reading the roster PDFs

Each roster is organized as a single alphabetical listing of members by surname. Surnames hyphenated, with prefixes (Mc, Mac, Saint, etc.), and with apostrophes are filed according to standard alphabetical convention. Members with the same surname are listed by first name in subsequent alphabetical order. Where the same individual appears across multiple roster cycles without an asterisk or dagger marker, the absence of the marker indicates continuing membership from the prior cycle (not a new election in the cycle's year).

The asterisk marker (*) identifies new full-Life-Member elections in the year of the roster cycle. For example, an asterisk after a name in the FY17 PDF indicates election to membership in 2017. The asterisk does not appear in subsequent roster cycles even though the individual remains a member; the marker is cycle-specific to the year of election.

The dagger marker (†) identifies new five-year Term Member elections in the year of the roster cycle. The Stephen M. Kellen Term Member Program is documented in Section IV. Term Members appear in the roster only during their five-year term; upon completion of the term, individuals are invited to apply for Life Membership, with most accepting and subsequently appearing in subsequent rosters without the dagger marker.

Post-2018 verification protocol

For individuals whose CFR affiliation began after July 1, 2018, or for whom roster-PDF appearance is uncertain, this Handbook relies on the second-tier primary sources described in Section II:

• The current CFR Board of Directors page at cfr.org/board-directors
• CFR press releases announcing new Board members or Distinguished Fellows at cfr.org/news-releases/...
• CFR expert biography pages using explicit "Member of the Council on Foreign Relations" or equivalent tier language at cfr.org/expert/... or cfr.org/bios/...
• CFR event transcripts in which the participant is explicitly labeled with primary-tier language
• CFR Distinguished Fellow or Senior Fellow appointment announcements
• CFR podcast transcripts in which a CFR Senior Fellow or institutional figure uses explicit fellow-tier or member-tier language to describe a third party (the Stuart Levey case documented in Section VII via the March 2025 podcast transcript is the worked example)

Speaking history at CFR events does not, on its own, establish membership; CFR routinely hosts non-member speakers. Foreign Affairs authorship does not establish membership; the journal regularly publishes non-member authors. Mention on a Wikipedia compilation page does not establish membership; Wikipedia compilations are secondary sources that require independent primary-source verification. The Handbook's methodology is consistent: the verification universe is restricted to publicly available primary sources, and the verification protocol distinguishes primary-source-anchored member-tier classifications from secondary-source classifications honestly.

This section provides the full reference key for the classification system used throughout the Handbook and the glossary of acronyms and terms used in the roster. Researchers reading the Handbook in selected sections rather than linearly may use this Section XVI as a self-contained reference.

Classification tier decoder

Glossary of acronyms and terms

A closing note on how to use this Handbook

The Handbook has been designed to be entered at any point and used in any reading order. Researchers investigating a specific federal agency cluster can read the corresponding section in Part Two without reading the prior sections. Researchers seeking to verify the verification methodology can read Sections II and XV without reading Part Two at all. Researchers wishing to understand the analytical findings can read Section XIV's fifteen Pattern Observations as a stand-alone summary of the Handbook's structural claims. Researchers who want the full architectural framework should read Part One in sequence.

The Handbook is also designed to be challenged. Every CFR-Member classification has a primary-source citation in the card. Every Pattern Observation is grounded in specific evidence documented in Parts Two and Three. A researcher who disagrees with a specific classification can consult the cited source and form an independent judgment. A researcher who disagrees with a specific Pattern can examine the underlying evidence and develop an alternative reading. The architecture's defensibility is its single most important methodological feature; the Handbook's value lies as much in its verifiable structure as in its substantive findings.

Researchers wishing to extend the work to additional individuals, additional agencies, or additional time periods can apply the same methodology: anchor every CFR-Member claim to either a static.cfr.org PDF page reference or a cfr.org URL using explicit member-tier language; use the CFR-Adjacent intermediate tier for cases of extensive engagement without primary-source documentation; use the CFR-Wikipedia-Listed tier for cases of secondary-source compilation without independent CFR corroboration; document Lattice and Consulting-Firm classifications for institutional positions outside the CFR proper. The methodology travels.

The Handbook closes here at the end of Section XVI. Beyond Section XVI are the support, books, and footer sections — the operational infrastructure of the publication itself rather than the analytical work. The fourth unelected branch has been documented to the standard the publicly available primary sources permit. The work is now in the hands of any researcher who wishes to verify, challenge, extend, or apply it.